unSeminary Podcast

Do you dread being asked to get up and host a weekend service at your church? Can just talking about hosting the announcements this coming weekend make your stomach turn? Is your team pushing you to drop the announcements? And maybe even more worrying, do you have a good reason not to drop them? Are you convinced something is wrong with the announcements at your church, but you’re not sure how to fix it? As a leader, are you confused about how you can improve this aspect of your church services? Over the last two decades, I have been leading churches from the second chair. I’m not the primary communicator, but I love leading on the operations and communication sides of what we as leaders do in the local church to help them grow and reach more people. So, that means that for hundreds of weekends, I have hosted weekend services in a bunch of different contexts. In doing so, I’ve learned a lot about how to do announcements well and ensure that this aspect of our weekend service is successful. I’ve had some pretty awkward experiences during weekend services that I don’t want you to repeat, like the time I walked out onto the stage to do the announcements after our band’s second song, only to find out later that the band had planned to do three songs! I’ve also learned a lot from coaching other church leaders, helping countless campus pastors get over their fear of doing announcements and raising awareness of why this part of what they do is so critically important to the development of their particular faith community. I understand that your team may not like doing the announcements or hosting your church service. Over the years, I’ve heard a number of reasons church leaders give for disliking doing the announcements. Here are a few: The Laundry List We’ve all seen someone get up to host a weekend service, and we can tell by the way they’re looking at the piece of paper in their hands that they have a long, boring list of items they need to talk about. They have four or five different things from three different departments happening over the next four weeks that they’re required to somehow speak about each of them with an equal amount of passion and energy. This is a terrible way to do the announcements. No one should ever have to rattle off a laundry list of items. In fact, the best practice is to narrow the focus, and have one item, two at the most, that the person who is hosting the service needs to move people towards. The Speed Bump Imagine for a moment that you are participating in an incredible weekend service. The music at the front-end is transcendent. It’s helping connect you with God and is taking you to a new place. It’s being spoken in a deep way that is sometimes hard to communicate with just words. And then, at that moment, the host gets up and places a giant speed bump in the middle of the service. The service takes a dramatic turn to focus on some problem with the youth ministry. There’s a plea to the congregation to step in and help prevent the kids from running wild in the streets. Speed bumps happen when the church leadership doesn’t think clearly about the place that announcements have in the overall flow of a weekend worship experience. It shouldn’t detract from everything else that’s happening. In fact, good hosting should feel like an extension of the worship and teaching moments during weekend services. Announcements should connect what’s being said and felt in the service to people’s schedules. Plan your weekend service announcements around a clear call to action that moves people to their next discipleship moment. The Weather Report Okay, this one’s a bit of a pet peeve of mine. You know that host who, every time they get up, starts with a weather report for the weekend. “Man, it’s cold out there today.” “Wow, it’s really sunny outside.” “Gee, I think it might rain this afternoon.” This verbal tick has its place in wanting to connect with the audience. Its heart is in the right place. Using this verbal crutch is simply a way of establishing common ground with the people that are listening. The problem is that if the host repeats this time and again, week in, week out, it becomes boring, staid. It’s the same when that one host gets up every weekend and gives a commentary on what’s happening with their favorite sports team. It’s a verbal cue that tells the audience that the next few minutes are going to be completely irrelevant to them, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as they stop paying attention. The way to avoid this verbal tick is to provide active coaching to the people who host your weekend services.Provide them with a clear framework rather than simply letting them get up there and do whatever they want. Active coaching can help avoid such verbal ticks, which are distracting and ultimately derail the weekend hosting experience. The Second (or Third) Fiddle This has to do with the host’s mindset. Some people think that hosting the weekend service announcements are not that important. In fact, it can feel like a demeaning task, like they’ve been given a junior varsity role when really, they want to be playing in the big leagues by giving the sermon during the service. If your people feel this way, it’s because you’re not clearly communicating how important this aspect is to the service. I believe that it’s time to raise the value of this aspect of our services. We need to see the announcements as a critical piece of what the church is doing on any given weekend and make a concerted effort to provide energy, feedback, and direction to our church leaders as they lead these critical five minutes of our services. I’m personally fired up about improving the hosting aspect of what we do as a church. It is not a minor part of what we do, but critically important as we really try to build the community and momentum as a ministry. The Sweaty Palms This is the opposite of the last point. The communicator that’s up on stage doing the announcements feels a tremendous amount of responsibility because of these five minutes. There’s nothing worse than a nervous communicator spreading that nervousness to the entire audience. This can create all kinds of problems for the rest of the service. Often lead pastors or whoever speaks on a regular basis at your church and doesn’t do a good job coaching people with sweaty palms because they’ve done it so often that they don’t need to think about it very much, and they don’t feel as nervous as the person with sweaty palms does. The antidote to this is practice. It’s one of those things you need to do time and again, not just in front of a mirror or a coach but in front of an audience. Over time, you will feel a new sense of confidence that will ultimately transition to the people around you. Another great antidote to this is co-hosting. Rather than putting all the pressure on one person, having multiple people on stage sharing the responsibility is a great way to train people up in this area. Looking for more help with your announcements? This FREE 3-part video series is for you. Are you looking to improve the hosting of your weekend services? Have you already tried improving this area but aren’t sure what to do next? Are you ready to take the next steps to increase engagement in your announcements and ultimately your church? I’m releasing a FREE three-part video series designed to help your church with better weekend hosting. The lessons in this series come from my practical experience of hosting hundreds of services in multiple contexts and coaching many other leaders in this area. The three videos are: Video #1: 5 Reasons People Aren’t Listening to Your Hosting. Your first video will clearly define for you why people aren’t paying attention to the announcements in your services.Video #2: The One Best Practice to Ensure Higher Engagement with Your Announcements. In this video, you will understand what the single most important practice thriving churches change about their announcements to improve engagement.Video #3: 3 Church Hosting Myths Debunked. Finally, you will dive into three misunderstood myths about hosting announcements that move people to action. [Click here to learn more and enroll for FREE today.]

Thanks for joining in for the unSeminary podcast. This week we’re talking with Kevin Singer, co-founder and co-director of the student-led movement, Neighborly Faith, which brings Christians and Muslims together. There is very little in the church to help equip believers regarding how to engage with our neighbors of other faiths in a way that is both committedly Christian, and also exudes the generosity and love of our Lord. Kevin is with us to share how Neighborly Faith seeks to equip evangelical Christians, particularly on college campuses, to love all our neighbors, no matter their religion. Neighborly Faith helps to build bridges. // What it means to love our communities must now include loving those who have different worldviews than we do. There are a lot of students who are passionate about Jesus and want other people to know about Jesus. The purpose of Neighborly Faith isn’t necessarily to teach Christians how to love Jesus, because churches already do this work, but rather to build bridges between Christians and those who practice other faiths around them. You can’t change hearts if you’re not in relationship and building trust with the other person.Get to know each other inside the walls. // Kevin encourages to begin by getting to know your neighbors and increasing proximity with each other. Visit a mosque open house and share a meal with the people there. Then invite them to come to your church, or home, and share a meal with you. Don’t expect people to do things that you won’t do, including reading the Bible. As you build relationships with Muslims and invite them to read the Bible, be willing to also read the Quran if invited to. If we truly believe that Jesus is immensely attractive in a world of many faiths, then have faith in that. But also have faith in the fact that Jesus is going to protect you spiritually if you engage with Muslims and their religious traditions.Work together on projects. // Helping serve the least of these alongside your Muslim neighbors can be fertile ground for relationship-building. Organizing clothing donations for Afghan refugees, for example, is not a Muslim thing, rather it’s obeying God’s command to love our neighbors. Go out and look for ways to do cooperative work with Muslims in your community and see what doors open up for the gospel.Gospel opportunities. // Most Muslims in your community have either never met a Christian, or have never learned about Christianity from a Christian. As you build relationships with Muslims, you would likely be the first person to preach the unfettered gospel of Jesus Christ to them. By inviting them over to share a meal, Muslim neighbors would be able to see the gospel embodied in the fact that you invited them in, you paid for the food, and showed them hospitality.Be clear on what you mean. // You can be gospel-centered while still having terrific, neighborly relationships with friends of different faiths. Instead of censoring yourself in front of other Christians in this area, name it to the people who you are most worried about and what they might think. Be vulnerable and let them know what you actually mean by your actions and building friendships with people of other religions.Figure out who they want to be. // All of our communities are more diverse than they were ten years ago. Neighborly Faith helps college students figure out what kind of Christian they want to be as they show up in the world and move into adulthood. Events are organized on campuses to bring Christian and Muslim students together. Christian pastors will speak onstage alongside a Muslim partners on different topics, such as how to suffer well or the purpose of prayer, so they can give their unique perspectives. The goal is for Christian students to then connect and have conversations with Muslim students, or Muslims in the community.Share the work back home. // Neighborly Faith also runs a fellows program to coach and equip students to do this sort of work at home with their churches. You can learn more about Neighborly Faith at www.neighborlyfaith.org. Church leaders who would like to learn more and have a conversation with Kevin can email him. 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: Medi-Share Medi-Share is an innovative health care solution for Christians looking to save money without sacrificing on quality. As the nation’s largest health care sharing community, Medi-Share members take comfort in knowing their eligible medical expenses will be shared by their community. Click here to download the FREE REPORT: The 10 Things About Mental Health Every Pastor (& Leader) MUST Know! Episode Transcript Rich — Hey, friends welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. Every week we try to bring you a leader who both inspire and equip you and this week is no exception. Super excited to talk to Kevin Singer. He’s part of a ministry called Neighborly Faith. It’s a student-led movement that’s bringing Christians and Muslims together. And I’m really excited for this conversation to learn more. Kevin is the co-founder co-director of Neighborly Faith. He’s planted two churches in the past. He’s got some war wounds and teaches world religion at two community colleges in Illinois. So glad that you’re here, Kevin. Welcome to the show. Kevin Singer — Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be here. Rich — Yeah, why don’t you tell us about Neighborly Faith. Give us kind of the overview to for folks that have never heard of of your organization before. Give us that that overview. Kevin Singer — Yeah, so like a lot of young people I took my one class in in college about world religion and and at that point I was ah you know, ah a perennial expert in in all topic world religion. Um, no, but ah, you know I took that course because I had to and… Rich — Mmm-hmm. Kevin Singer — …Um, you know and and I think the way it was framed, I think it’s still framed, is like how am I going to survive this, right? Like how am I going to… how am I going to get through this class? Um, because apparently as a young Christian I was susceptible to literally all other religions besides my own and… Rich — Sure – that’s funny. Kevin Singer — And ah…but me for real I came in and you know the whole thing you you know I sort of had apologetics brain at that point and, you know, and for a lot of the things I was hearing in that class, you know, for a lot of it I was able to say, oh you know, Jesus is better. Jesus better, you know. And then I’ll never forget when they showed this video of ah the the Hajj, which is the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca – um part of the five pillars of Islam -and you know just seeing scenes of of of ah Muslims just just crying um with and and seeing that sort of ah emotional response was a bit perplexing. I think it was it wasn’t it wasn’t as easy as and well they have works and we have Jesus right? Rich — Right. Kevin Singer — Which is what you hear a long time which is so it’s so you know that’s how we dismiss you know billions of people and um I remember I took this to to my Cru – I was in Cru at the time, leader in Cru which is a ah national campus miss – love love them um… Rich — Mmm-hmm. Kevin Singer — And and and you know I give him credit, my discipler at the time. Um or someone I met with every week who just provided sort of like spiritual mentorship. I said you know you know I’m really having this struggle. Um, you know because I know, you know, all the religions are all other religions are false, and and you know Jesus is the only way, but I’m really struggling with the humanity of this, you know, just um… it’s easy to be like it’s easy to say those sort of isms. You know that that we have as Christians, but I mean these are these are people who clearly have like a spiritual bone in their body. Rich — Mmm-hmm. Kevin Singer — Ah, trying to figure this out you know and in in I think at the time I remember him saying yes you know don’t worry about that. You know, they they need Jesus, and let’s just focus on on on getting the gospel to him you knowm which is which is true. Um, and but I think I remember feeling like despite the fact that that’s true, it still felt sort of like a deeply inadequate response to… Rich — Mmm-hmm. Kevin Singer — …You know what is my responsibility to to these people in our community. and so ah, as you mentioned before I planted a couple of churches with the SBC – the Southern Baptist Convention North American Mission Board – um, which was a good experience. Towards the end of my ah North American Mission Board ah funding cycle, I needed to sort of supplement my income. So I walked into the community college down the street um because they had a new testament course. Ah yeah I could teach a new testament you know… Rich — Yes. Yes. Yes. Kevin Singer — And yeah God – everything comes full circle. You know you’re like never gonna encounter the world religions again. Well, they said well you know this this guy he’s been teaching new testament for the last two hundred and seventy years and there’s no way he’s going to give course up. So he said he said why don’t you teach world religion? You could do that, right? Yeah, you know I’ve got my dad in my head like you never turned down a job right? Rich — Yes, yes. Kevin Singer — So like oh yes, of course I know everything about world religion. I could definitely do… I think my my spouse that’s I was was pregnant with our first with our our first… and um I was like yes absolutely I can do that. So for that first semester I was learning right along with my students. But what was most impressionable to me is just the incredible conversations I was getting in with students across a number of different faiths who were learning about, for example, the Trinity from a Christian for the first time in that course. Um, and just seeing like wow there are some really incredible opportunities for a whole slew of people who sort…we have Christians have said, well if they’re not atheists then they’re set they’re, you know, they’re done. They’re you know they’ve they’re they’re, you know, sort of programmed by these other faiths, and and and… But what I found was a lot of curiosity and interest in Christianity. Um, and so I ah I started talking to some of my Christian friends family about this and everybody was kind of like, that that’s weird like… Rich — Mmm yes. Kevin Singer — That whole thing is weird like we don’t have a category for like cross-faith… like like we we know how to reach an atheist like we’ve been talking about that for decades, but like a Muslim? Like what do we even do with that? You know and it really is just so so so a long story short was for me… and I recognize that there is there is very little in the church to to help equip us for how to engage with our Muslim neighbors and other faiths – so Buddhists, Hindus, etc – in a way that is both a committedly Christian right? But also ah… Rich — Mmm-hmm. Kevin Singer — You know it exudes the generosity and the love ah of of our Savior and Lord who who deeply loves these people and is in is seeking them as much as he’s seeking anyone. You know I think of I think of Paul and in Acts 17 and in Athens he’s like the the God who you seek is seeking you. He’s here. And like there there’s just this incredible opportunity, especially as our society becomes increasingly diverse. And so I met my colleague Chris who runs the the organization with me at Wheaton. We were studying theology together and um, it sort just sort of took off from there. we we we started a podcast where we interviewed Christians who are doing this work who you know maybe not be on the front page of Christianity Today. Rich — Yep. Kevin Singer — Um, and eventually we started you know, ah raising money to engage Christian college students and sort of what does it mean to be a Christian in a society of many faiths? And and I’ll leave it at that. Rich — Love it. Kevin Singer — That’s sort of how we got there and why we think it’s important is because our society’s more diverse. There’s more Muslims, Buddhists, Jews (especially non-religious) than ever before who do not have a Christian worldview. And so what it means to love our communities must now also include the question of how do we love those who have different worldview than we do. Rich — I love that you know I remember years ago hearing a commentator or thinker in this space saying you know there was a time where the kind of faith community was like and a dining room table where you had you know on either ends there was kind of the Protestants and Catholics and then there was everybody else. And you knew that there were other people at the faith conversation but it was really a Protestant/Catholic thing. Kevin Singer — Yes, that’s right. That’s right. Rich — But however, now, we’re really at a roundtable where um, we have people from a wide variety of backgrounds in our culture I think anyone any leader who’s listening in who’s paying attention to the faith dynamics in their community have seen that. That is absolutely what is happening in all of our communities. Again I’ve said in other context every zip code in America is more diverse today than it was ten years ago and will be more diverse ten years from now than it is today. Kevin Singer — That’s right. That’s right. Rich — So when you when you’re coaching students – I love this – what would be some of those kind of early conversations you find yourself getting into? How are you helping? What is that kind of those those early discussions look like as you’re helping students on campus think through these issues? Kevin Singer — Yeah I think number one what we found is there are a lot of students who are passionate about Jesus and want other people to know Jesus. and that we we don’t feel like the the purpose of our organization is to teach Christians how to love Jesus or how to share Jesus. We believe strongly that churches are already doing a really good job at this. We we we’re one of those like evangelical adjacent organizations that still loves evangelicalism and feels like there’s a lot to to there’s a lot there and there’s a reason why evangelicals are still some of the most passionate, committed, convicted, winsome, persuasive Christians in our society. We believe that. What we want to see is an increase not in godliness or faithfulness to the great commission, but proximity to these people. Rich — Mmm. Kevin Singer — Like what we found is is is we are, first of all, we’re a deeply pragmatist organization. We we do not, you know, we’re we’re not up late at night digging deep into the wells of like inter-religious theology and all those things. What we’re interested in is how can we be sort of bridge-builders between these Christian communities who are mostly Christian, and the people within those communities know and are friends with mostly Christians, and that mosque down the street… like like who is gonna who is gonna make that invitation and who is going to… So for us, it’s an issue of we know you love Jesus. It’s obvious. Like you just spent X number of dollars of who X number of miles for example to be at this conference… Rich — Yep. Kevin Singer — But the question is, you know, how can you get in this… because… in the same room, because you can’t actually change hearts If you’re not in relationship. Rich — Yeah. Kevin Singer — And and here’s the thing. That used to make a lot more sense than it does now in our increasingly depersonalized additional society where the idea of like slowly building relationship and trust is just not part of our repertoire anymore. Like like we like we’re we’re much more attuned I think to thisæ Rich — Sure. Kevin Singer — …Like hit and run gospel stuff than we are now to this like patient, slow… like I just I don’t just know Muhammad for an hour, I know Muhammad for a month. Or I know Muhammad for six months. Or I know I’ve known Muhammad’s family for a year right? like the only way Muhammad – which happens to be the most popular name in the world by the way, so I’m not just about just coining that. I’m saying a lot of Muslim men are named Muhammad. Rich — Yes. Kevin Singer — But like Muhammad is not going to become a Christian ah, if you are not in their life. And and here’s the thing. I think for a lot of us Christians, we’ve been discipled when it comes to interfaith ministry – I really don’t like that word and we can discuss that later – but like we have been discipled into the space as like maybe God will give them a dream. It like like we… and that is pretty much the extent of our theology of other faiths is like… well I can’t… Rich — Righ, right, right. Kevin Singer — There’s no way I’m walking in that mosque and there’s no way that like I’m having dinner with Muhammad but God will send a dream. And I know I sound sarcastic and I kind of mean to be a little bit that like like that is wildly insufficient if we like really care about the Great Commission, um is is – and I mean we see we see Romans, Paul is just like you know how will they know if they haven’t heard and if no one is set right? Rich — Yes. Kevin Singer — Like how beautiful the feet of those who preach good news. And so for us like where we start is just the simple fact of like your community that you love includes people of other faiths. And you know what it means to be cross-cultural now cannot be divorced from other faith traditions, right? Like when we talk about Afghan Refugees right? We’re not just talking about Christians – we’re talking about a lot of Muslims. So when we talk about afghan culture, right, or the culture of immigrants coming to our country, we can no longer to divorce that from the five pillars of Islam and… so what does that mean for us to be, you know, equipped? And so you know some of that I think includes getting to know Islam. But we don’t like telling people that you need to be an expert in Islam to reach Muslims because we have found that that’s another major hang-up of Christians is… Rich — Right, right. Interesting. Kevin Singer — …well, I’ve never read the Quran and it’s like well they’ve never read the Bible. Would you suggest that you don’t approach you? You like… Rich — Yes, yes, yes love it. Kevin Singer — But so ah, you know, without getting too deep into the weeds. You know we really want to foster that, like you need to be in the same room. You don’t need to be an expert. Um, and you know relationship and building trust really matters in this particular space. Rich — Love it. You know I … one of my, when our kids were little one of the things you know you feel like as a parent, there’s like a lot of what you do you feel like fits in the middle of the bell curve, like I’m not sure that was positive or negative it it just was. And then there’s a bunch of stuff where you’re like, I’m not sure that was actually helpful. And then there’s a very small percentage of things you do where you’re like, that actually maybe was like a momentary flash of goodness which is not a lot of those – you have a few of them. I remember when our kids were little we had at one December with our neighbors who were Jewish and then friends of ours that were celebrating Kwanzaa. Kevin Singer — Yep. Rich — We had all three of our families got together and had a great kind of winter celebration. Hey why don’t you Why don’t we talk about our various traditions… Kevin Singer — Oh that’s great. That’s great. Rich — …and and and work through it and it was actually it was fascinating because in that conversation we guys Christians got to talk about the difference between… our our Jewish brothers and sisters didn’t really get the the -which is I found shocking at the time – really didn’t understand the nuance between Jesus and Santa that like those two things are are not really connected. That the the whole Santa tradition is not really a part of what we celebrate as Christians it just… And it was great. It was like and it was like humbling because I was like, oh I really have no idea what I’m talking about and so… Ah, so proximity. Let’s talk about that. I love that. How are you… I’m sure you’re talking to church leaders and I’m sure you have like the go-to advice like, here’s the thing that you should be doing to increase proximity. What would be some of those two or three things that you find yourself talking to church leaders consistently about increasing proximity to, ah, you know other faith groups in their community? Kevin Singer — Well, the first thing I want to say is it’s really nice to see someone accidentally put the Christ back in Christmas. That that’s pretty that’s pretty hilarious. And after all the culture wars you were like, I’m somehow doing that despite the fact that I had no intention to. Rich — Yes, yes, exactly, exactly. Kevin Singer — Um, mad respect mad respect for that. Um. Yeah, so increasing proximity. So so practically speaking number one every mosque in your community probably has an open house once a year. That’s a great opportunity to walk in the door, share a meal. Um, ah this is not this is not like ah like a like ah ah, Romans 14, you know, 1 Corinthians, like food sacrifice to idols kind of thing. This is just food that was cooked in a certain way that promotes ritual cleanliness and it’s not that unlike kosher… Rich — Yes, yes, halal. Kevin Singer — Um, and so you’re not walking in, you’re not walking in and sharing food that you know was put on an altar or whatever. It’s it’s it’s it’s it’s probably the same food that you’re getting from your ethnic grocery store, you know, sort of down the street. Um, so I would suggest go to an open house. That’s a great place to start and then I would suggest returning the favor: would you would be willing – you and your families – to come to our church and share a meal with us? Because here’s the thing, if there’s anything I’ve learned in multifaith ministry, it’s that returning the favor and inviting people to do what you’re willing to do is always a great step. So like ah just last week I was speaking at Cru’s winter conference in Indianapolis to like hundreds of college students about this right? And what’s really fascinating is one of the students said, you know I can just I cannot get my Muslim friend to read the Bible. He will not do it. He will not open it. And I said, what would it look like for you to actually read the Quran, and tell him, I’ll read a little bit of the Quran; you read a little bit of the Bible? Rich — Yes. Kevin Singer — Right? There’s just that there’s that reflexivity. There’s that mutuality that promotes a lot of exposure ah not just for you to learn more about their worldview, but to them to learn more about your Christian worldview. And if we truly believe as one of my favorite theologians ever, E. Stanley Jones ah, who wrote “The Christ of the Indian Road”, if we truly believe that Jesus is calling and he and he is just immensely attractive in a world of many faiths, then have faith in that. And but also have faith in the fact that Jesus is going to protect you spiritually if you engage with them and and their religious tradition. Rich — Oh. Kevin Singer — Um, I think we can say that if we truly believe that he is um, you know there’s no Name under heaven, then I think it’s actually an extension of our faith, not a portrayal of our faith to engage with, say the Quran, for the sake of inviting them to engage then with the scriptures. So mutuality. Showing up to their open houses. Um, working together on projects can be sort of a fertile place to go. Like so I brought students from Cru’s winter conference to a local mosque and we organized clothing for Afghan refugees. There was nothing Muslim about that right? Rich — Yes. Kevin Singer — Like, in fact, we showed up and we did that because we have theology of loving neighbor, right? So we’re we’re not drawing on their theological resources. We’re drawing on our theological resources by showing up and and organizing clothing for the least of these, right? So there’s there’s that cooperative piece as well. But I understand if some people out there are like, I’m not I’m just not ready to be publicly seen cooperating with a Muslim in that way. And I would say start small. You and maybe one other person in your church. Maybe go to the mosque for an open house or send an email to the imam there and say, hey we’d love to host a family or two at our home, just to get to know you because you’re members of our community. We want to love you and bless you in any way we can. Um, here’s the cool thing, number one I’ve never seen a Muslim in the five or six years I’ve done this ministry that’s like, no absolutely not. It’s always the opposite. Always, we’re so excited you reached out. We want to get to know you… Rich — Love it. Kevin Singer — …and and the number one thing most people need to hear is most Muslims in your community have either never met a Christian, or have never learned about Christianity from a Christian, so you would be likely the first person to preach the gospel or speak the gospel in a Christian way, not in a way that’s littered with, well here’s the contradictions and here’s where it doesn’t fit with the Quran and here’s, you know, why Muhammad or… Rich — Right, right. Kevin Singer — Or you know other Muslim voices have disagreed with this doctrine. Like you would actually be able to preach for the unfettered Gospel of Jesus Christ and they would be able to see that embodied in the fact that you invited them over, you paid for the food, you invited them in. Um so the opportunity is so rich. Um. Rich — Mmm-hmm. Kevin Singer — I mean again, these are not people who have heard the gospel a thousand times and are now deconstructing. These are people who have never heard it and fruit is truly there. It’s truly a fertile ministry. Rich — Love it. Now you had talked earlier about you don’t like the word interfaith. I’ve heard you say multi-faith let’s talk terms – why why don’t you like that term? Kevin Singer — Yeah, yes. This is a critical question. Okay, so um I… obviously being in this space there are a lot of invitations to be a part of what are typically termed interfaith groups or groups that are like, let’s get one of every type of person in the room. We’ll hold hands. We’ll sing a song. You know we’ll wear our our robes and our hats and then look, we’re all together and we all agree, kind of like. And we we have engaged in every kind of way and we just continually find that it’s it’s really difficult to find a space that identifies as interfaith that does not sort of subtly ask people to leave their most passionate beliefs at the door. Rich — Okay, yeah. Kevin Singer — Um, because the truth of the matter is like, we as Christians believe something that is both incredible and offensive, right? Rich — Yes, yes, yes. Kevin Singer — Like and and there’s a sense in which a lot of interfaith groups – and you’ll see them in your community. Usually there’s posters and flyers where you know sort every symbol is is on there and they’re like, hey come on now. Um, we would certainly never tell someone like don’t be in a room with people who you disagree with. We would never say that because I mean that’s the whole point of our ministry. But what we would say is it is always a better use of your time and investment to say, Christian community, let us connect with a other faith community, than it is to try to work through some like typically more progressive interfaith group that, you know, is is likely not going to be super excited about the idea of you wanting to share your faith. Rich — Right? right. Kevin Singer — Um, even though I would say they are just as persuasive in their particular worldview as we are in ours. Um, it’s just different right? So anyway… Rich — Right? Yeah, yeah, well I could see that. That’s an interesting distinction where I you know I think we’ve felt that tension right? Where it’s like, yeah I want to engage; I think that’s really good coaching like, hey let’s try to engage directly with a mosque… Kevin Singer — Yes, yes, yes, perfectly said. Agreed. Rich — …or indirect with even even more granularly with some neighbors or with some friends rather than an intermediary group who is who is essentially saying, hey friends if we could just all believe a third thing which actually isn’t what you believe or isn’t what our Muslim friends believe, it’s it’s a third thing which is… Kevin Singer — Perfectly said. Rich — …hey we some all somehow all of us are kind of in this weird middle ground. I love that that’s that’s great. Kevin Singer — Perfectly stated you said better than I could actually. Rich — So no, that’s great. That’s I think that’s I was great insight on your on your side there. So now let’s say I’m sure there’s church leaders that are listening in that as a person, like as an individual they would say, Yes, there’s something in their spirit that would say yes, this is a great thing, I should do this. But then quickly and behind – and maybe it’s just me that’s saying that – quickly and behind there’s the like, Ooo if I take steps as a leader in this direction, it’s going to look like… Kevin Singer — Yeah. Rich — A whatever – I’m becoming more liberal – I’m whatever they’re they and different. You just have different problems with that. Kevin Singer — Yeah, totally totally. Yes. Rich — Is it possible… I love what on your website says… you can be gospel-centered while still having terrific, you know, neighborly relationships of friends, you know, a different faith. Kevin Singer — Yes. Rich — How what would you say to a leader who’s feeling that kind of nerves that’s feeling that kind of oo tension. Kevin Singer — So what we’ve learned in this space in this particular area is you have to name it. So like instead of sort of – trying to think of the word here – instead of sort of censoring yourself in this area for this for the sake of sort of Christian cultural purity, what we’d say is name it to the people who you are most worried of what they might think. Like name those things, say, look y’all know I love Jesus more than anybody, you know, but I’m really afraid that if you’ll see me walk into this mosque, you’re going to think this… but what I want you to know is what I actually mean is this. Rich — Right, right. Right. Kevin Singer — There’s really no like this is one of those areas where like vulnerability and just naming what your fears are to the people who you’re you’re afraid of their thought or opinion really pays off. And you’d be surprised. We get this question so often. I got this question ten times when I spoke last week at Cr. It’s like, what are other people going to think? I’m like, tell them, like I’m afraid of what you’re going to think. Will you think this if I do this? And it actually creates some great conversations about sort of the importance of engaging difference. Well and sort of do we even have a framework for that. And um, I mean if you think about it, it’s it’s well I don’t want to draw too many hasty comparisons. But I think we all know the tension of being invited into a space where it feels like our convictions may have been compromised in order to enter that space. You know whether it’s a mosque, or see an LGBT wedding, like we were all familiar with this like we’re invited to something and we just are afraid of what people are going to think. Rich — Mmm-hmm. Kevin Singer — And I think the great thing is is that we’ve got a lot of scriptural um evidence for walking into spaces that are not sort of in total agreement. I mean Paul in the synagogues for God’s sake. Do you know like or … hell … the marketplace is right?. Rich — Mmm-hmm. Kevin Singer — The the ah you know the the areoppagus and in in Athens right? Like entering like sometimes we have to pierce the darkness um to bring the light and I think so I think there’s some scriptural credibility in saying I’m going to walk in. And that doesn’t mean that I’m any less Christian for doing so. I’m bringing my light my tabernacle of Christ with me into these spaces and I expect him to show up in some big ways. Rich — Yeah, isn’t that a sad – you didn’t say it I’m saying it’s my podcast – isn’t it a sad commentary on our place in the kind of Christian development over the years that what was one of the core tenets of Jesus actually being with people who are being with the unclean being with people who… Kevin Singer — Right. Rich — Are perceived as the not the people you should be a part of – that was actually how his ministry was known he was known as a drunkard and a partier because of the people you hung up with and isn’t it a weird – here we are two thousand years later and it’s like it’s flipped upside down. That you know where that is a concern. Ah, that’s you know that’s but that’s a sad reality that we find ourselves in for sure. So how does Neighborly Faith how do you actually engage? So I understand I get to get a sense on campuses I can get a sense of what that looks like. Do you do work with, you know, churches and how how do you, you know you’re speaking, what does that look like? How are you actually helping people in this area? Kevin Singer — Yeah, so a lot of our work is campus-centric insofar as you know we want to essentially what we want to do is when we we want to build into sort of the missiology of young Christians a missiology that spans, you know, religious diversity right? So because it’s really ah in seminary and it’s in college where students are like what kind of Christian do I want to show up as in the world? They’re sort of individuating from their parents and they’re you know, receiving a lot of curriculum, sort of like how I show up in the world as a Christian for the next fifty years of my life will be shaped very strongly by what I experience on campus. And so we’re we’re trying to get into the recipe in a sense. Um, now where churches come in is we’ve had pastors speak at a lot of our events as the Christian dialogue partner. Um, and so we’re constantly asking pastors like would you be willing to get up on stage and talk to a Muslim about, I don’t know, pick pick a topic. Ah you know, ah you know what does what does it mean to suffer well? Or like what does it mean to um, you know what’s the purpose of prayer? Or have topics that both people can sort of present their unique perspective on as a Christian as a Muslim. Um again, this is you know E. Stanley Jones, one of my you know heroes, he he wrote ah a book called you know “Jesus at the Roundtable” and a lot of it sort of was this like you know when you present the Christian experience with other experiences for some people in that crowd. They could say there’s something unique about that experience that Christian experience of suffering, or faith, or struggle or… Rich — Mmm-hmm. Kevin Singer — And so we’ve had we’ve asked pastors to be part of those conversations we’ve had churches host um our our students and and Muslim community members for events. Um, yeah, we’ve got church partners who, and pastors who, encourage us and mentor us in our work. Um. But but the the large ah emphasis is sort of bringing Christian students to these conversations and connecting them with hopefully Muslim students, but sometimes it’s it’s Muslims in the community who may not necessarily be students… Rich — Love it. Kevin Singer — …so that’s that’s where a lot of our our interests are. Um, we also have run a fellows program where we sort of coach students and equip students and resource students to do this work with their churches and so one of our our fellows, Carissa, a few years ago she, you know, used our coaching and our resources and she brought her church to visit a mosque that year, wrote about it for a bunch of different platforms online, and it was just incredible sort of the the amazing conversations that were had as a result of that mosque visit. And she went to you know a very very very very conservative church. I mean it was, again, there was a lot of naming. You know this is what we’re doing. This is not what we’re doing. This is what we’re saying; this is not what we’re saying. And we helped her to sort of frame that so that the elders of this very very conservative, rural church were like sure that makes sense to us. We can do that… Rich — Right, right. Kevin Singer — …and and it was great. So those are some of the different ways we’ve we’ve worked in in through and within churches in our work. Rich — Love it. That’s good I do want to give people contact information so they can get in touch with you… Kevin Singer — Sure. Rich — …but anything else you want to share just as we kind of wrap up today’s episode? Kevin Singer — Yeah, so there’s one more thing that I like to share especially you know with with with more moderate to conservative Christian audiences, is that our work is not an endorsement of like the best possible sugarcoated version of Islam. Like we don’t we don’t actually feel like we have to say Islam is great in some way to do this work. Um, sometimes there can be confusion like well. It seems like these guys have bought into this idea that Islam is actually not what everybody, you know, or or what some people say it is. I mean we I mean we are still thinking, convicted, thoughtful, prayerful people that like yeah like we do ah see issues within the Quran. We do see you know ah ah things within the Muslim faith that could if, you know, thought through and identified a certain way lend themselves to violence. Like like these are things that we see and but for us the question is not, is Islam here to you know subvert our society and destroy us? It’s, are these people who God has called us to love? Can we be ah, test a testament to Christ in their lives? That is our our emphasis, but it is not to the dismissal or the ignoring a very real and legitimate concerns about certain aspects of the Muslim faith. And I think it’s important that I say that that you don’t have to sacrifice any skepticism or suspicion. That you have to decide to maybe suspend some of those suspicions and fears in order to be a witness in their in the life of someone who’s never heard the gospel. And I think it’s always important for me to say that for for those people who are like, I just I can’t get past that. Here’s the thing you don’t have to. Rich — Sure. Kevin Singer — But you do need to get past is your fear um because we were not given a spirit of fear but a spirit of love, right? And and a spirit of power, and we can we can we can exercise that in the lives of our Muslim neighbors. Rich — Um, Kevin this has been so good. So helpful. This is just the top of the very tippy top of of the the iceberg that we’ve touched on here and I’d love to encourage people to get connected with you. Kevin Singer — Absolutely. Rich — So your website is neighborlyfaith.org – where else do we want to send them online to get plugged in to connect with you? Kevin Singer — Yeah, so we are on all social media platforms. You’ll find us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook ah at neighborlyfaith. It’s pretty easy to find us. Um, if you are ah a pastor out there, or a ministry leader, or a church planter who is just like this sounds great, like I think it would actually be really good for our people to hang out with some Muslims this year. Like send me an email – I’d love to just have a conversation with you and just say how can we help? How can I encourage you, support you? Rich — Love it. Kevin Singer — We we do have some funds to help with bringing Christians and Muslims together and so if your if cost is prohibitive for you, we’d love to be in conversation. Rich — Love it and and why don’t we give us your email. We’ll put it in the show notes too. But don’t give it just so people hear it in their in their ears too. Kevin Singer — Sure it’s Kevin at neighborlyfaith dot org. Rich — Perfect. Well thanks so much, Kevin, I appreciate you being here. Excited to hear and track with what you know as your ministry grows and impacts more people in the future. Thanks so much for being here today. Kevin Singer — Thanks so much for having me. This was great. Great questions and and look forward to continuing to follow the podcast as well.

Just when you thought the word “unprecedented” couldn’t possibly be used any more, we continue to climb into levels of inflation that haven’t been seen in over four decades. In fact, the last time we saw inflation this high, the world was a completely different place. Bread had soared to the cost of 50 cents a loaf. Late-night TV was ruled by Johnny Carson. A newfangled invention called the modem was just released for personal computers (which had barely taken off). Ted Turner had just launched a TV station that broadcasted news 24 hours a day called the Cable News Network (“that’ll never work!”). We find ourselves leading in an environment of increasing inflation. Although in the local church world, we may not see its impact right away, it is going to affect your church and mine. Small business owners in your church are no doubt trying to puzzle out how to increase the fees that they charge for the services or goods they provide to combat inflation as it continues to rise. In a recent study by the US Labor Department, inflation had peaked at 7%, which is something that you and I need to take note of as leaders in this environment. [ref] What difference does inflation make to our churches in this season? Put most simply, inflation erodes an entire country’s spending power. As inflation continues to rise, the cost of goods continues to increase, and salaries try to match those levels. The entire country has a more and more difficult time purchasing goods with existing resources. This was one of those financial earmarks that we were watching carefully at the end of 2021. In fact, most economists were advising waiting while we got through the Christmas season to see what would happen in the new year. But alas, inflation is continuing to rise. Our churches need to think carefully about how we react to this as we plan for our ministry for the rest of this year and beyond. Here are a few articles to dig deeper into understanding inflation: Investment Executive: Fed to signal rate hike as it launches risky inflation fight. The Washington Post: Prices are rising all over the world, and leaders see no quick fix The Wall Street Journal: Inflation, Supply Chain, Omicron Expected to Take a Bigger Toll on Global Growth In 2007, I had the opportunity to travel to Zimbabwe, which just happened to be in the midst of a rapid inflation increase. It was a heartbreaking time to be in the country because during the two weeks we were there, the cost of everything doubled. One of the key church leaders we had met with was converting donation dollars into building bricks. He was literally buying bricks to warehouse for future church building projects down the road that were yet to be authorized because although the Zimbabwean dollar was worth less and less with every passing day, he at least could have a giant pile of bricks under lock and guard that could be used in the future. The current inflation that we’re experiencing isn’t going to be anywhere near that level, but it is something that we need to be thinking about carefully as we plan for the future. This blog post really isn’t financial advice for your church. I would suggest that you need to secure solid financial advice from trusted individuals as you think about how to position your church financially for the future. What I want to talk about here is a series of things that we can do as leaders to help guard our churches from the impact of inflation in the coming year. You may hear such financial advice from your advisors as: Borrow now with interest rates at an all-time low. These are bound to go up, and now’s a good time to lock in rates. Refinance your mortgage. If you’re carrying any long-term debt, now might be a perfect time to either pay some of it off with the cash you have on hand or refinance for the future. Plan for a 25% wage increase. Although your wages are not likely to jump that high, it is a good to consider what would happen if the cost of your staffing were to jump by 25% overnight. Lock in long-term pricing. Now would be a good time to renegotiate every contract that you have to secure long-term pricing at today’s lower rates. While this isn’t financial advice, the following leadership options could help your church as you deal with inflation in the coming weeks and months. Leadership Hedges To Help Your Church In a Time of Inflation When we talk about a leadership hedge, we’re referring to a protective move that you could do as a leadership team now to ensure that your church is prepared for inflation in the coming year. It’s about positioning your team and community to weather the storm of increasing fees and costs of doing what we do over the next 18 to 24 months. Proactive Fundraising Plan At its very core, inflation is about increasing the cost of services. The cost of “doing business” is going to be higher a year from now. If we don’t continue to increase the amount of revenue that is coming in per individual giver, we could be caught in this gap with the costs of “doing business” increasing without the same happening to the revenue from our church. What would it take to see a 7%–15% increase in revenue this year on a per giver basis? This considers the total number of givers as well as the revenue per individual giver. It could include actions such as an active appreciation plan, where you reach out and ensure that people are clear on how thankful you are for your giving, or a year-end campaign—oftentimes, churches see a significant bump of anywhere between 10% to 15% in the last 45 days of the year. It might even include a plan to convert occasional givers into regular givers. For example, we all know that converting people to online giving is key to the financial health of our organizations going forward. Explore New & Novel Investing Strategies Over the last two years is that many churches have increased their cash positions. As we went into the pandemic, we became more fiscally conservative and wanted to increase the total number of “weeks” of reserve funds that we had on hand in case of an emergency. Many churches grew their cash on hand in a matter of weeks or months of an emergency stopgap. The problem with that is that the cash that we’re holding is slowly devaluing if it’s not returning at least 7% interest, which is not the case in a simple bank account. That cash is losing value, and unless we look carefully at how we’re investing it a year from now, the money that we’ve saved up over the last two years could be eroded significantly as the cost of what we do increases. Now might be a good time to reexamine your portfolio risk and reward ratios and understand that this money is given to your church to help in case of a rainy day, and although in some ways we’re not free from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are through the most significant phase of it. It would appear that there are sunnier days ahead on that front. You might want to take a more risk tolerant approach to your investment strategy knowing that you’re potentially not going to need this cash for years to come. You could even look to more novel approaches; in fact, we’ve seen a number of churches across the country who became sole owners of an LLC using these cash reserves to actually do active investment, including opening up an entrepreneurial venture, such as a coffee shop or a rental facility. (We’ll be talking more about this in the coming months at unSeminary to give you some practical help and guidance in this area.) Increased Leadership Development Spending Your team is the best hedge against uncertainty. I’m not talking about increasing salaries, although this may be something that you need to look at in the coming months. Now is the time to double down on the resources that you provide to your staff to increase their leadership development. While the cash sitting in your bank account may not be earning you interest, if you were to raise the leadership capacity of your entire team this year, that would pay dividends not only in the short term but also for years to come. This could be the year to spend more on conferences that can both inspire and equip your team. This could be the year that you hire coaches for various departments. Oftentimes, experts from the outside can provide a great shortcut to your team as they’re looking to reach new people and increase the overall effectiveness of their ministry. It could also be the year to add extra support in the way of part-time administrative help or remote staffing contracts that could be simpler to get out of in the long run but could provide a great lift to your leadership in this coming year. Look for “Noticeable-Less” Cuts One of the tough realities of leading in an inflation-driven environment is when you look carefully at the spending side of what we do. I remember years ago, when we were in a period of reducing spending across the board, we cut back on the budget that our kids ministry team used in their craft budget and got it down to a really small amount. And to be honest, it was such a useless cut because it not only cut away at a core experience for our guests but also didn’t make a substantial difference to the overall operation of our organization. We can’t cut the budget by 10% by limiting googly eyes in kids ministry. We need to look at significant items and ask the question as we come out of the pandemic: are there things that we need to cut that people will notice? What is the pet project that our senior leadership team has held onto for too long that we just need to get rid of because it no longer helps us effectively for the future? During the pandemic, are there things that we learned we don’t need that it’s now time for us to act on? What can we cut that people would notice and would make a difference to the overall budget? I suggest that looking for “noticeable-less” cuts around 10% is the way to start. These kinds of cuts will cause your leadership team to breathe deeply and ask if they really need this ministry area but could provide great long-term financial health for organizations on the other side once they’re gone. Consider Tech Upgrades I know this might seem like a strange point to make as you consider the option we just talked about, but this could actually be the perfect period to double down on your purchasing of tech equipment that could help multiply your ministry in years to come. Is there enabling technology, such as RESI, that could help you launch new locations and that you’d rather spend today’s dollars on than dollars a year from now? Accelerating purchases like this is a wise decision in this season; because of the inflationary effects of the loss of spending power, the money you have right now is more powerful than it will be a year from now. It will be more expensive to buy these items even then. Look for items that will extend the reach of your church. This could include things such as new camera gear to add more capacity to your online experience. It could be something within your multi-site strategy that could help you open new campuses more quickly. This is a perfect time to consider more tech upgrades as you look to the future. Still looking for more help as your church deals with inflation? Try this. If you’re looking for the next steps to take coming out of this article, I would suggest three things: Get your team together. Let’s not hide from the fact that inflation is a real thing that’s happening around us. It has been a shift in our culture in the last year, and it will help your team to see inflation in their areas. Share this or similar articles about inflation to help them process and think through what might need to change in the life of your church. Discuss what actions you could take. Find actions that empower your entire team to help them take steps forward and ultimately grow as a community. You can do this—your church will prevail if you continue to stand. At this point, you’ve been through the toughest season of leadership in a generation, and this trail on the impact of inflation will test the lessons that you’ve learned during the years dealing with COVID-19. We’re cheering for you and are in your corner.

Thanks for joining us for this month’s Office Hours podcast episode. Today Rich is answering your questions about attracting young families and getting help with hiring your next team member. John Boyle, executive pastor, Calvary Bible Church in Boulder, Colorado: “I wanted to pick your brain on attracting more young families to our church.” Know your neighborhood. // The ESRI Know Your Neighborhood Tool provides mapping information regarding neighborhood styles at a granular level, which drives deeper into social behavior in your area. Have your leadership team talk about the ESRI neighborhoods in your area and how you are connecting, or not, with each of these groups of people.Five things to try to connect with young families. // 1) Host a parenting series targeted directly to young families. 2) Audit your kids ministry by getting someone to look at the quantitative and qualitative results of your ministry pre-COVID and post-COVID. Bring in a strategic outsider to help you find where you could be doing a better job with things. 3) Think life milestones for your church. Listen to this podcast with Kurt Brodbeck from Northview Church for life milestone examples. 4) Ask a focus group of five families how you can make it easier for them and their friends to connect with your ministry. And then ask how you could help them right now. 5) Find the things that the families with young kids in your area care about and get outside your walls to get involved in those things. How can you serve and love and care for the schools, kids, and young families in your community? Audrey Eisenberg, executive pastor, Inland Hills Church in Chino, California: “How can we get the word out about opportunities in our church in such a way that they feel exciting and meaningful to the kinds of people who we would love to have join our team?” Internal versus external. // Look at internal and external church hires from two different perspectives. What are you trying to accomplish? You hire someone internally for an area when you want to maintain the good things that are working and incrementally improve. But you hire externally when there’s an area in your church that’s broken and you want to find a way to accelerate and fix it moving forward.Cultivate your relationship internally. // If you’re thinking about hiring internally, create some fishing ponds where you can better get to know potential leaders in your church, and then hire from there. Determine if any of your top 50 donors might be able to move into a leadership role. These people are already bought into your mission. Or put together a list of key leaders and host a book club. Get together, read a book and talk about. This allows you to get to know people better and identify potential future hires.Network outside the church. // In networking outside of the church for an external hire, create a spreadsheet with three columns. In the first column write the name of 10-20 people who have some sort of existing network. Rate their influence from one to ten in the second column, one meaning they have a huge social network and ten being not that influential. Then in the third column rate the likeliness of them getting your jobs out to people on their networks. Sort the names by the influence rating and then by the possibility of the networking influence column. Start with the top of the list and work your way down to ask them if they’ll help you share about your open roles. Thank You for Tuning In! There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, but you chose unSeminary, and I’m grateful for that. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it by using the social media buttons you see at the left hand side of this page. Also, kindly consider taking the 60-seconds it takes to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, they’re extremely helpful when it comes to the ranking of the show and you can bet that I read every single one of them personally! Lastly, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, to get automatic updates every time a new episode goes live! Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: Leadership Pathway If you are trying to find, develop and keep young leaders on your team look no further than Leadership Pathway. They have worked with hundreds of churches, and have interviewed thousands of candidates over the past several years. They are offering a new ebook about five of the core competencies that are at the heart of the leadership development process with every church that they partner with…just go to leadershippathway.org/unseminary to pick up this free resource.

Welcome to the unSeminary podcast. Today we’re talking with Jason Poling, lead pastor of Cornerstone Church of Yuba City in California. For the first ten years of Jason’s ministry as a pastor, he felt like he had been living in “maintenance mode.” While his church was experiencing growth, some of which was due to brand new believers, a lot of the growth came from the already-churched crowd. After a bold prayer for God to increase his faith, in 2019 God opened his eyes to the massive, unchurched population in the digital world. Listen in as Jason talks with us about the mission field in the Metaverse, how your church can begin to reach the lost, and even establish a campus there. Ripe for harvest. // The Metaverse is a unique space where especially younger generations who are digital natives go to build relationships. No matter how cool or relevant your church is, there are some people who will never attend a brick-and-mortar church. Yet the Metaverse provides an easy entry point for them where they can check out a service and interact with the other people there in a safe, low-pressure way.What is VR church? // The Metaverse version of services at Cornerstone Church are very much like being at the in real life (IRL) location. Instead of seeing physical people, you’ll see their avatars. As you walk toward other people in the Metaverse, audio is spatially constructed and you’ll be able to hear them talk and enter into conversation, just like IRL. The one thing you need to participate is a VR headset. In the Metaverse, Cornerstone streams their services, similar to how they would on other platforms like Facebook or YouTube. In addition to VR, you can utilize Discord (similar to a beefed up version of Zoom) and Twitch (a streaming platform that goes beyond YouTube) to create a robust experience in the Metaverse.Keep a connection. // Cornerstone Church of Yuba City treats their VR church as one of their campuses and maintains a connection between their IRL site and their Metaverse location. Talk to your IRL campuses about what God is doing in the Metaverse location, and talk to your Metaverse campus about what God’s doing in the IRL locations. Hybridize training and offer opportunities for things like bible study or small groups for your people both IRL and in the Metaverse. Make use of Discord and its ability to use a two-way camera to provide opportunities for more interaction between IRL and the Metaverse. Share vision and prayer requests across campuses.Build relationships. // Remember that people primarily visit the Metaverse to connect. Serving people in the Metaverse can look like approaching them and asking them how you can pray for them. While it might seem creepy to approach a stranger out of the blue IRL and do this, it’s normal in the Metaverse. Many people might be discouraged, lonely or depressed and hungry for relationship. Even if people might want to be anonymous at first, in the end they are much more open to conversation in the Metaverse. There are always opportunities to share Christ’s love and encourage others.A world of its own. // Jason suggests thinking of the Metaverse as a world that has different continents. Each VR platform (AltSpace VR, Rec Room, Horizons, etc.) is a different continent with different tribes that have had very little exposure to the gospel. Test the waters. // You can experience the Metaverse world first by logging into the 2D version to find what might be attracting people on that side. Then pick up a VR headset, which currently is about $300 and talk with people. Explore the world and Metaverse church services to see what you can do and what the Metaverse has to offer.Try out small events. // When you’re ready to set up a church experience, Altspace VR is one of the easier platforms to try out your first Metaverse service. Set up an event and it will show up to others who log into the platform. It will start small, but keep showing up, don’t get discouraged, and persevere in sharing Christ’s love and the community will grow.Diving deeper. // Curious about the Metaverse and the mission field there? Rich will provide an Oculus headset to the first church leader who emails him and takes time to explore the Metaverse, as long as they provide a 500 word write-up about their experience there—the good, the bad and the ugly—to be shared on unSeminary. You can learn more about Cornerstone Church of Yuba City at www.cornerstoneyc.com and find information about their virtual services there. Jason has also provided a copy of his article about diving deeper into the Metaverse world for download. It shares his story and offers encouragement for people who might be skeptical of the value of starting a Metaverse ministry. Help Taking Your First Steps Into Metaverse Ministry View this post on Instagram A post shared by unSeminary (@unseminary) 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: Medi-Share Medi-Share is an innovative health care solution for Christians looking to save money without sacrificing on quality. As the nation’s largest health care sharing community, Medi-Share members take comfort in knowing their eligible medical expenses will be shared by their community. Click here to download the FREE REPORT: The 10 Things About Mental Health Every Pastor (& Leader) MUST Know! Episode Transcript Rich — Hey, friends welcome to the unSeminary podcast. Man, so glad that you’ve decided to tune in. Every week we try to bring you a leader who will both inspire and equip you and today is no exception. This is going to be a conversation that’s going to push you in some new directions. Super excited to have Jason Poling with us. He is from Cornerstone Church of Yuba City, a fantastic church in California. They have a location there in the physical world, but then also one in the Metaverse. So super excited to have you with us today, Jason. Welcome to the show. Jason — Great to be here. Thank thank you Rich. Rich — I’m really excited for this conversation because I feel like everywhere we go, we’re talking about the Metaverse and I’m excited to actually interact with a church leader who’s taken a few steps ahead for us and is leading and trying a few things and learning. So this is going to be a great conversation, but let’s fill in the picture. Tell us about Cornerstone. Give us a kind of a bit of the flavor of the church that kind of thing. And then we’re going to jump into all things meta. Jason — Yeah, so we’re we’re just north of Sacramento but we’re in a small agricultural area – I mean it’s a bigger, everything’s bigger to some degree in California, and Texas of course but I lived in Texas as well so yeah I can say that… Rich — Sure sure. Nice. Yeah. Jason — but um, we’re in ah in about 150,000 people and at the in the in the area we live. Um, I’ve been at this church about 4 years it’s ah it’s a sort of a medium, small to medium size church. Um, you know when I came it was just ah was kind of struggling and God has really done a great work over the last 3, 4 years – been so thankful for that. And we just ah, it’s a church that you would not expect that would go into the Metaverse at all. If you came to my church, especially 3 or 4 years ago that would not even cross your mind. Rich — Right. Yeah. Jason — And so I will will of course go into all the detail details on how that happened. But it’s really been neat to see the church really get excited because the church that I’m at, they definitely have a heart for mission. They want to see people come to Christ. And so that is really been the driving force and impetus and and so allowed this church to do crazy, I mean crazy things right? The Metaverse! So it’s it’s been great. It’s been a great great experience. Great church here in Northern California. Rich — So good. Yeah, this is a part of what I’m glad you brought this up because I was as I was doing some research you know, look digging into the church kind of seeing who who you are. Um this is like a normal church like you are you know, which which again I didn’t know how to say that I didn’t want that to be ah you know demeaning. But ah, which I which hopefully actually motivates people to be like hey this should be something we should be be thinking about. So let’s tell this story a little bit. How, why did you end up in VR or or you know Metaverse? What did that… How did all that happen? Tell me that story. Jason — Yeah, yeah, so obviously everyone knows the pandemic. We know that that that happened that’s a reality and of course that pushed everyone digitally, so that did have a huge part of in the whole picture but we were actually moving that way and God again – God’s Sovereign – so thankful. Were preparing and moving that way well before the Pandemic. So I’ve always been involved in technology, very interested kind of geek out like that I love gaming. I remember even back in the day… I’m I’m ah older than I look – of course you guys can’t see me the podcast, Rich can see me – I’m older than I look. Um, but I I would be very interested in VR. I remember going to malls and they’d have these little little booths set up and you could do like a game or kind of a Dave and Busters kind of place where they’d have ah a VR. Of course it was really generic. It was like diving into like Tron, if you remember Tron… Rich — Yes, yeah, yeah, yep. Jason — Tron-type of quality of of graphics but it was still amazing. And so VR just never quite took off, never got to the commodity pricing and the ability to kind of mass distribute it. And then of course Oculus, and then of course Zuckerberg and Facebook and he took Oculus over and then of course now the Meta right? . Rich — Yes, yes. Jason — But anyway, um I’ve always been interested in technology. So when I saw about VR coming out, I was really excited just from a personal level. But as a pastor, I mean as you are, I mean we I just want to see more people come to Christ and as I began to look at the statistics, you know that all, everyone listening this podcast knows that we’re not on an upward track right? The the movement is not going upward in terms of seeing more people come to Christ in the United States and and people being churched. And so I’m like man. How do we reach them? And so it just, a bunch of things came together I’m like, the meta versus huge. Rich — Mmm-hmm. Jason — There’s you know literally billions of people you know, communing on the Metaverse, fellowshipping in their own ways on the on the Metaverse, in the Metaverse, and I’m like, this seems like a hand-in-glove situation. Rich — Yes. Yes. Jason — We could get out there and start reaching. And that’s exactly what we decided to do. And we got a team, we got a team together. Some, obviously some, younger people to start, but you know believe it or not we’ve got some older members of our congregation that are now involved in in the ministry in the Metaverse. But we did start with some younger that were more digital natives and we just started doing it. Um, we basically started April of 2020. So right right there at the at the pandemic. And we’ve been doing it ever since. Rich — That’s amazing. Jason — And been it’s been amazing to see the conversations the connections we’re making with people. Especially younger generations that have no connection to the church tell us time and time again they would never have gone. They say it. We would never have gone to a brick and mortar church. No matter how cool it might have looked or relevant. We wouldn’t, we wouldn’t go. And so VR just provided this a little bit more easy entry point for them. It just it feels a little more safe so because you can pop out quickly. Rich — Yes, yes, yes. Jason — You know you go and you don’t you don’t get stuck at a service where you’re nervous they’re gonna, you know, sacrifice chickens on the on the altar or something, you know, they can get out quick. So… Rich — Yeah, yeah, totally totally. Jason — It’s just an easier entry point. And then once they’re in, and you develop relationship with them, begin to share the gospel with them, people get saved. That’s that’s what we’ve been doing for 2000 years, right? So anyway that’s we just did that and that’s what happened so. Rich — Love it. Dude, I love it. So good. So give us a sense of, so I think, you know, folks that are listening in.… we were joking about this ahead of time… you know, I would say are in that like understand in a broad sense what VR is understand in a um, yeah, like get us a little bit of a sense of what that looks like. Fill out the picture for us though. What is VR Church? What are, what…what kind of… what is your ministry look like in the Metaverse? How, what are the kind of… you say you have a campus in the Metaverse – what does that look like what is the kind of scale and scope of the ministry? Jason — Yeah, it’s great question. And it’s it’s really, it is at this stage in the game it’s kind of interesting to see because most people that they just don’t have any idea… but it’d be it… I love trying to get people into it if I could get them ah get to wear a headset, just to try it out and see they would actually find. And if they came to one of our services they would find that it looks pretty similar to what happens in IRL, or what we call IRL is In Real Life church – physical church. Um, and that may be just the way that I have chosen to do it just for my own bandwidth. I I realize you know I can’t create something completely new here. I know it seems crazy to go the Metaverse. I’m like, I’m already preparing a sermon preaching twice on Sunday morning. I just want to kind of do the same thing ah without having to stress myself out. And so I wasn’t sure if that would work. But again people are people, and people are hungry for truth. And so what I what I we basically do almost the same service in the Metaverse. So the only difference that you might, would experience would be you wouldn’t see physical people. You would see avatars. But when you’re in the 3D experience it’s very immersive, of course, the whole point of 3D and Metaverse… Rich — Yep, that’s the point. Jason — …is it’s spatially constructed right? So you actually can walk over to somebody and hear them more clearly and if you walk away, you can the the audio is even spatially constructed and so it really creates exactly what you feel like when you walk into your church on a Sunday morning in real life. And so it’s really not much different. Now, there’s other ways to do VR ministry. I’ve got buddies that just go straight up ah, go evangelize. Well, that’s not much different either just going street evangelism right? They just go into they go into VR pubs and just strike up a conversation. So it’s not it’s, virtual reality obviously is replicating, it’s mimicking what we experience in in reality and so it’s not that different. I think what’s hard for people to get past is the the currently the quality of the the graphic rendering right? So some of the, if you watch one of our videos we post, someone you can see them on Facebook, Youtube, or our livestream ah from our VR services… Rich — Mmm-hmm. Jason — …it’s 2D and you can do it 2D but you’re you’re not going to get the immersive experience. And so when you watch it, it’s going to feel, it’s going to look a little cartoonish. It’s kind of hard for people to get past that. But if you can get past the idea that it’s not about the the quality of the graphics, the cartoonish nature of of the avatars, it’s the people behind the souls behind those avatars. Then then you can start saying oh this makes, this really makes sense. So I think it’s just getting over those hurdles… Rich — Yep. Yep. Jason — …of the unknowns. So yeah, it’s very similar what we do on Sunday morning IRL. Rich — Yeah that’s great. Yeah that’s fun. And what um so what networks are people like, if someone’s saying, I want to, actually, how do you invite someone to the the VR version of your church? What does that actually look like how do how do you… how do you actually make that happen? How do I get somebody to actually attend one of your services, you know, in the Metaverse? Jason — Right. So I mean one one thing is just go to our website. You can go to cornerstoneyc.com… cornerstoneyc is for Yuba City dot com and then slash VR so pretty pretty simple to get there. Rich — Yes. Jason — And then they can see where we’ve got the links to the two the three platforms that we’re currently on ah, VR. And then we also have our Discord… which I don’t know how much your listeners know about Discord’s like a Zoom on steroids. Really awesome robust platform and then our Twitch channel, which again I don’t know if these might be terms no one knows what that means. But it’s it’s it’s a streaming platform ah you know more like Youtube but even beyond that. Rich — Yep yep. Jason — And so we have we have access you can get into any of those places. Of course our Facebook, normal Facebook page, and YouTube page will show the streams of the services. So you can you can actually go and see it really simply. Now to actually go in the immersive side you do, at that point, need a headset. Rich — Mmm-hmm. Right. Jason — So that is the one obstacle to entry. But again, we’re we’re really trying to reach people that are already there, already digital natives in the VR Metaverse. Um, but you can go out and get one for what $299. So it’s not it’s not cost-prohibitive for someone to… Rich — Yeah, totally. Jason — And I would encourage anyone listening, I mean, if just to, I mean most and probably a lot of people you’re you’re you’re talking to probably have the budget in their church to buy a $300 headset for the staff and then just kind of dabble just kind of experience it… Rich — Just experience it. Absolutely. Jason — …and see see what it is so it’s not. It’s not really a loss actually – 300 bucks is pretty, that’s pretty nice. I mean you could you could start a church in the Metaverse; church plant for 300 bucks. Rich — Yes, yes, yeah, come on that’s amazing. Jason — That’s that’s insane. It’s insane. Rich — Yeah, that’s incredible. How have you been casting vision for this in the you know in your real life church in the on you know in the physical space? Ah, what does that look like how how do you talk about this with people in your in your you know the physical you know location? What does that look like how are you kind of helping move people you know IRL into you know the virtual world? Jason — Yeah, yeah, great great question. Of course you know, um it all obviously the the senior leader has to be excited about something and keep it in front of people, so that that’s I think one of the reasons why obviously it’s taken off here is I just talk about it a lot. I’m so excited about it and we tell stories about what’s happening there and so we always talk to the in real life congregation, the campuses about about what’s happening, and vice versa. We talk to the VR campuses about what’s happening IRL. So there is, ah there is a beginning, and not just the beginning, it’s really come to some maturity of ah of relationship. And there’s a few things that have happened. Ah, one one thing we’ll do is when we do trainings – um like I’m right now doing a bible counseling training. Um, you know we got about 50 people in in process with that. We’ve got we we did life group training… Rich — Totally. Jason — …ah preaching trainings, all that kind of stuff – we always hybridize it. So that was one of our initial goals is make sure this is not just this separate thing… Rich — So good. Jason — …Outposts that they have no connectivity to the in real life church. No, it’s hybridized. And so when we train, we’ll have them on Discord and that’s, again, a wonderful platform for that. And two-way cameras, speakers – we got it all set up to where it’s it’s it’s really awesome… Rich — Yeah, yeah. Jason — …that we can interact very…And so there’s a lot of relational development that actually occurs there. We’ve gotten a lot of our members on Discord here IRL so they’re interacting with people. Um, we in a VR family reunion where about twelve people… or maybe not quite twelve – a couple couldn’t come… they came out to northern California from our VR family to hang out… Rich — Oh that’s fun. Love that. Jason — …hang out with us for a weekend. And so they and they stayed at some of our IRL members houses just a lot of overlap a lot of fellowship. Rich — Love it. Jason — Um, just a lot of ways in which we, you know, we pray for each other all in the Facebook group together. So when a prayer request comes out, it’s VR or IRL. It doesn’t matter. It’s all the Cornerstone, as we call it, the forever family and and so we’re all in this together. So we’ve just really been strategic about making sure there’s ah, a connectivity, a hybridization between the campuses. So it’s not this outpost. Yeah. Rich — Ah, yeah I love that one of the things I’ve been saying is I think ah, the our online ministry, you know so many of us have done, you know, church online. We’ve tried to figure that piece out and yeah, like we were… the pandemic…like gosh the ultimate, like man, we’re so glad we took those steps. But it’s still to me, and listen I started doing church online in 2009 – been doing it for a long time. We spent a lot of time, effort, energy, a lot of brain cells on it. Ah, but it still feels like we’re not quite there yet. It still feels like we’re um, it’s not quite. It doesn’t feel native. It doesn’t feel like it’s from the technology right? Jason — Yeah. Rich — It doesn’t feel like, it’s, it feels like we’re bolting something on. And I love that you’re trying to mesh the two to hybridize because I think there’s some magic there. What have you learned as you’ve tried to bring those two communities together? Any, kind of, steps that you would say hey you know we we should be thinking about these things if we’re trying to to take you know a step in that direction? Jason — Yeah I want, well I should mention too one one thing we did do – and this is where you know your cost does go up if you want to go this far – and you know obviously to start you don’t have to do all this. It’s all 300 bucks and everything’s free… Rich — Yep, yeah yes, yep. Jason — …but we did hire a Metaverse pastor. So and I think he might be the first meta… like his title is Missionary Pastor to the Metaverse. Sounds so cool, you know… Rich — Yes, yes, love it. Yeah, that is so cool. Jason — …but he’s down in Fort Lauderdale so he’s the entire country away from us. I got connected… Rich — Oh, very cool. Jason — …I got connected to him through I don’t know if you don’t Jeff Reed in Stadia – Jeff, I think, is Exponential now. But anyway, ah so this guy’s Michael Uzdavines is a great guy and so he’s our Metaverse pastor. Um, but he comes out… we have him come out with some regularity to the church here and he’ll preach live. He also actually preached on our big screen to the whole congregation. That was really ,that was really an awesome experience too because he could see, he could see all of us right? Rich — Yes. Jason — …two-way camera while he’s preaching to the IRL congregation. So, anyway, that’s that’s one thing I forgot to mention that just kind of, again, brings the thing together a little bit. But um, you know I think we just, I don’t know if there was a strategy other than just constantly trying to bring the two together in every setting so in vision, visioning as well. Rich — Yes, yes. Jason — So we’re doing… I think I sent you this thing about in IRL… we’re trying to do this thing called our City on a Hill initiative to really kind of go to where the people are instead of trying to always get them to come to our church. Um, long story short, we’re like well how do we do that also in the Metaverse? Rich — Mmm-hmm. Jason — And so we’re we’re making sure that the the visioning that we that we cast, the vision that we cast, and the things that we’re doing, we try to replicate it both ways. And so we did thing called Love Yuba City,…Yuba City’s two counties that’s ah where we’re at, we’re just kind of on the line. So ah, we went out and and took a Sunday… a lot churches do this… we took a Sunday off and went and served the community in all these different ways. Well in the Metaverse we did the same thing. Rich — Very cool. Jason — So it’s not, you can’t do some of the physical things, but there’s a lot of ways that you can bless people believe it or not in the Metaverse. Um, and so we just kind of replicate those things make sure we’re all in the same page… Rich — I Love that. Jason — …when we’re doing ministry and so it all feels a lot more connected I guess. So I’m not sure we really I wish I could say we we mapped it out for years… Rich — Yeah, yeah. Jason — …and had this perfect strategy which I could say I wrote a book on it. No, we kind of just dove in and just had that concept of… Rich — No, it’s good. Jason — …IRL is so important. I do think still the physical, that’s how God made it it. It is superior. But it doesn’t denigrate or mean that we can’t do ministry digitally and try to bring the two together somehow. So we just had that as our kind of north star and and everything is kind of flowed flowed from there. Rich — Love it. We’re going to come back that put a bookmark in that. Ah, but I want to talk about, I want you to flesh that a little bit more.. What were some of the things that you were doing to serve the community in the Metaverse? What did that look like? How did you again, you know you can’t… building wouldn’t necessarily be, you know, going and helping paint someone’s house is pretty easy – just click and you know change the color. So what, you know, what were you doing in in the Metaverse to help serve, you know, in those communities? Jason — Yes, the first year we did we basically we started out and said, hey how about this Sunday morning – since we’re not gonna have service to this afternoon – go out into your local community and and serve in some way and then let us know, like tell stories, you love to hear story. What what did God do? So that was cool and of course they did that as well this year. But we also said why, in the Metaverse, why don’t we all go in together and we’ll go to all the different worlds together. And just, I think, they I was actually… I couldn’t be there because I was at the one here in in IRL… but Metaverse pastor had them all put on avatar, like their name, and then “how can I pray for you?” And so they go around to say, hey you, just want to know if… Rich — Oh yeah, that’s cool. Jason — …hey if there’s anything I can pray for you about. And believe it or not. It’s not as maybe creepy as it sounds because in the Metaverse people are there to connect. Like that’s why they’re there. Rich — Sure. Jason — And so usually people will strike up a conversation, they could pray for them, encourage them. There’s also things I don’t think anybody did this year, but what we want to do eventually is, there are, as you know, there’s a lot of digital, there’s a whole economy that occurs in the Metaverse. So right now we’re getting to crypto and blockchain and nfts, you know, so there are things that you can do that are tangible in that they’re economically related, ah to bless people where they’re at in the Metaverse. And so we’re kind of envisioning what would that look like to have something that was more tangibly beneficial… Rich — Yep. Jason — …to people to to the Metaverse denizens. You know what I mean? Rich — Yep yep, Yep! Absolutely, love it. So good. Let’s pull back and talk a bit about the Metaverse. So I I was listening to, so I’m hoping, my hope is – because I’m gonna, I told you heads I’m gonna be a little bit of a devil’s advocate. My hope though, is exactly what you said – that people go out and buy a headset, and actually jump in, jump into Atspace, jump into… and and experience this. Because um, you know this goes back to Second Life ten years ago where we were, you know, Life Church was like, hey let’s put a Second Life campus on and it was like amazing. Jason — Yeah, yeah. Rich — Um, you know I think we’ve been scratching, culture has been scratching this itch for a long time, and it would appear like things are lining up and we’re going to actually end up in some sort of VR connected Metaverse here and so are, we’d be silly to not take these steps. So friends I think we should. You know we should do this. I heard recently, I heard ah a ah pundit talking about the Metaverse and said you… know like this year in 2021, so this is just going to go out in early 2022… but in 2021, it’s estimated that 16 million VR headsets were sold. In the same year 3 hundred million crocs were sold and this person was saying listen, like the the scale of this is still infinitesinally small… Jason — Yeah. Rich — …like it is it is… and I often joke about this… I know that a technology is reaching mass adoption when two things happen: when my when my wife, or my mom are interested. It feels like a long time until my wife or my mom will put on a VR ah headset… Jason — Yeah. Rich — I can’t imagine a day, but it it it seems like a long ways away. How far away from that kind of adoption do you think we are, or what will be some of the things that will need to happen before we see that kind of adoption, from your perspective, from someone who is working and living and playing in the Metaverse already today? Jason — Yeah, the great question I do think it’s still and it’s it’s, you know, and there’s ah if you can do some research and stuff and yeah I’m not like heavy… and DJ Soto’s another guy is a great friend who started the first virtual reality church. He’s done a lot of this… I think it’s really interesting to see some of the trends of when something reaches a tipping point. Rich — Yes. Jason — And sometimes it gets, so VR is technically past this point where it it could, ah it could be a technology that goes the way of the dodo bird right now. It’s past that point but it’s still in the trough where it’s not taken off in a massive way but all all ah, all indicators point that it’s going to, like you just said. Rich — Mmm-hmm. Jason — I don’t know when that’s gonna happen, but one of the big players, I mean once Apple drops something then the game game’s over right? I mean it is, is that thing, that’s why I meant, I think because Apple currently is in development with, and of course top secret right? But it’s all, things get leaked… Rich — Yes. Jason — …but they do have some um AR/VR ah, glasses that they’re working on. It may not be something that is massively adopted because it’s probably gonna, you know, as Apple always does, cost a lot. Um, but they’re, Apple’s so good at creating a you know creating ah a a culture around some a product, creating an ethos, making something look good… Rich — Yes. Jason — …and work well. And so I think what I’ve seen in some of the early indicators it’s going to be not these clunky headsets, it’s gonna be real nice… Rich — Yes. Jason — …and trim. And I think once that happens… and I think that’s why Zuckerberg’s kind of trying to really get ahead of the game because he wants to be the guy who’s known as the Metaverse guy, not Apple. Rich — Right. Jason — …and and I yeah everybody else is gonna, once Apple breaks it, I mean I was in the cell phone industry back when the iPhone first came out and it’s crazy right? Like now it’s it’s ubiquitous. I mean like your your grandmother does have and ah iPhone now. And so it just happens so fast. I think once Apple does that I think we’re off to the races and it will just… Rich — Yeah, that’s good. Jason — …Will just keep accelerating. And of course you got to have on the other side—the software developers, the coders—as they get better at their craft and have more resources at their disposal, and it becomes ah just graphically rich, and it overcomes some of the obstacles that might be there, it’s going to be, it’s going to take over the world. Now some people, it can be a little dystopian when you start thinking about it… Rich — Sure sure. Jason — …and it might be, but you know this underview. We’re not able to you and I aren’t going to stop that and so we somehow have to not give over everything to it but yet reach into where people are at and that’s where they’re going to be so. Rich — Yeah, totally. Well and I think it’s the same… listen friends, I for years, it’s amazing, like for years we were hounding people to get onto social media. It was like, friends, like your people are there and there are still a ton of communities… and these stats are like publicly available… there’s a ton of communities across the country where 60% of the population is on Facebook weekly which I know we all think like Facebook it’s old and it’s like, you know, it’s like old school that people aren’t there anymore. But when you think about that if 60% of the people in your town were doing something every single week, you’d be silly as a leader to not go and check it out at least – to say hey we got to do something there. And so where we seem to be I would totally agree with you on that I think from a future facing point of view, we’re headed here. This is not, to me, it’s not in the question of if, it’s just a matter of when… Jason — Yeah. Rich — …what, how are we and and folks like yourself, um, you know are leading the way helping us understand that. You know the other thing I heard which captured my imagination that I think I think is really true is in a lot of ways we’re already there. Like we are already layering over top of our physical existence a digital layer. Jason — Yeah, yeah. That’s ultimately what the Metaverse is about is it’s about layering on you know in a Ready Player One ultimately a sort of way, but we’re already doing that. If you own an iphone and you have a set of airpods with Siri connected you already are layering on a level… Jason — Yeah. Rich — …a layer, a level of data on top of your real world existence. It’s the same with with Amazon’s Echo – you’re layering in data in a way that was really inconceivable just a few years ago. Jason — Right. Rich — Um I noticed actually this this ah Christmas season that Amazon’s Echo headsets which are, it’s it’s a headset that you’re designed to wear all day long, so you never take it off and it’s an AR experience – that is trying to take Echo with you. And I I think those things all point in the direction of, oh this is where this thing is headed like we are, how do we use data to you know enhance our reality and I think there’s really something there. That’s that’s really what Jason — Yeah, that’s wise. Yeah I think you’re right and and the Metaverse, yeah, basically it’s just trying to bring in other senses right? Rich — Yes. Yes. Yep. Jason — It’s trying to bring in the visual rendering of what you just described. I think you’re right on. We’re already doing it from the audible level right? Rich — Yes. Jason — …and and to some degree I mean I guess that’s probably the only sense that you’re necessarily getting in terms of the AR layering. But yeah, but what what VR is bringing or what Metaverse is bringing is is the visual I mean that’s all it’s happening. Rich — Well yeah, and yeah, and you can see I think again I think on the audio side and I listen I’m not… you’re the expert in this area, I’m definitely not the expert… but to me it feels like that a udio is the back door ultimately to the Meta the Metaverse. If we can convince people or if as people get convinced, you know, what would be great would be to carry around the entire internet not just in my pocket, but in my ears, that I can talk to and have that thing either connect with other people, or play whatever songs I want to play, or you know in our case, hopefully you know recite this scripture verse, or you know connect with my friends… Jason — Yeah, yeah. Rich — …that it’s only one step further to a set of great glasses that help me connect you know with people who are in other parts of the world. It’s actually not a a giant step… Jason — No, it’s not yeah. Rich — …you know which is an interesting, I don’t know, interesting thing. Well so this is great, if people are listening in today I’m hoping again, they’re they’re convinced that they should pay, maybe take a take a run at this. They should actually take a step. What would be a couple of those first steps beyond the, okay so I’m, I’d like to I buy a headset and they’re probably on sale because it’s in it’s January when this is out, so I can get a good deal on one of those. What would be some of those first steps that that you know, kind of all of us should take? Jason — Yeah, I mean definitely if you know you could check out like our website or or yeah DJ Soto’s VR church. You can kind of at least look at what it is. You could then go and see from a 2D experience the livestreams or what have you to kind of check it out. Then you could actually download, you can download most of the platforms and again think of the Metaverses in terms of this world that has all these continents and then there’s all these tribes on the continents, and basically it’s it’s a mission field. There are new tribes that have no, or very little exposure to the gospel. I’m always amazed at how little ah, the the folks the Gen Z-ers and Millennials on there just have no exposure. But anyway each continent is kind of like a platform. So for example, we jumped in first to Microsoft’s continent which is called Altspace VR. And then we also have one in VR chat which is not affiliated with any large tech company. Rich — Mmm-hmm. Jason — But Facebook’s got their Horizons now that just launched into -it was in beta for a while. You’ve got Rec Room which is massive. Rec Room is not connected to a tech, a large tech, well they’re large but they’re not known. But they but they’re great in that they have cross-platforming so you you basically reach everybody everywhere – cell phone, console, VR headset – everything. Rich — Mmm-hmm. Jason — But anyway any of those places you typically, typically… I know Altspace can do this… you can download in VR chat you can download um a 2D version so you can actually enter into the world, talk with people, all that stuff… kind of like what second life was basically that’s what it was… um so you could do that, you could experience if you if you didn’t want to spend any money you could do all that just to kind of expose yourself, go to go to a and I would encourage you get the headset, I mean it’s only 300 bucks and then go to some church services. Go to ours, visit us, visit DJ’s, visit the others, and and just kind of see what it feels like. Check out the world. Just kind of enjoy. Just have fun. Enjoy seeing what the Metaverse currently has to offer. And then from there if you’re like um, my goodness there is so much fruit in the harvest field out here, because I because I guarantee if you’re, if you even try to strike up a conversation, it so often happens within the first five minutes you’re gonna be in a deep conversation. I’m always amazed when I go in there because it’s not like the IRL. In that in the IRL it does feel like everyone’s on their in the Rat Race right? Rich — Mmm-hmm. Jason – And you might go to you go to church and after church you try to hang around talk, but people got things to do and they’re out. Rich — Right right. Jason — In the Metaverses people, the whole reason they’re there, the whole reason is to connect and communicate. And sometimes a lot of people are very discouraged, lonely, depressed, and so, and they also feel at first a degree of anonymity that allows a little more freedom of expression, but quickly the and um the anonymity goes to the wayside. It’s like this cool entry point. But then you you begin to know this person, deeply. And and so anyway, you’ll you’ll find if you even just try to open up a conversation and you can say hey you’re you’re from a church. You’ll start having some… now you might get some trolls, that there are some trolls if you know what trolls are… Rich — Yes. Yes. Jason — …ah and and God, Jesus loves trolls too. So but they can be pretty that can be pretty brutal sometimes but at the same time there’s a lot of opportunities for for… anyway. So you get in there ah, if you’re like wow this is awesome. The next step you’d want to do is is just literally let’s say you start an Altspace which is probably one of the easier places. Not the most populated; it’s it’s it’s actually pretty small in terms of numbers. But it’s it’s easier to get into and try it out. They have all these already made worlds for you. Rich — Right. Jason — So you don’t have to craft anything. All the coding is done for you and you can actually set up your event just like you would on on Facebook events or something. Super simple. And and if you’re a pastor listening you’re like man I I am nowhere near a digital native. I guarantee you there is someone. If you’re a large church, on your staff… Rich — Yep. Jason— …There’s someone on your staff that’s digital native that can do it in their sleep. I guarantee you if you’re a small church. There is someone in your congregation. Probably a teen, a millennial, that that um, that is a digital native. If you just…[unclear]…mission and say hey I got a mission field for you. I I’ll come alongside you and disciple you along the way. But here’s a headset, go in there set up an event. It’s super easy and that’s all free. And then it shows up and when people come into the world at the time that you do your event—maybe it’s a service; maybe it’s just a hangout—um, they’ll see your church on the events page and a lot of times they’ll check it out. Probably some somewhat to troll. Maybe. Rich — Yeah. Jason — Somewhat just because it’s like hey, I’ll check it out; I’ll talk. And you will start to have conversations. And it will start small. We started with like I don’t know three or four people. And now probably on a given Sunday in Altspace we probably get, I mean it’s not like, we’re not megachurch, by the way, I mean, and you you are limited a little bit on the amount of people that can be in just just because of the the coding, and the and space that you can have, so we probably get thirty forty people on average in our Altspace… Rich — Yeah. Jason — …we probably get I’d say sometimes we have 70 in VR chat but, you know, probably forty/fifty. So I mean but these are all all souls that don’t know Jesus, we’re trying to reach them so… Rich — Absolutely. Jason — …and and some of them do know Jesus there’s plenty of stories I can tell you about that. So anyway you just start the event. And then just then it’s just the old the old way of faithfulness. Just show up every time. Just keep showing up. Don’t get discouraged if for several weeks or for a while you’ve got three or four people. Those are three or four people, I mean, that you can reach for Christ. Rich — Yep. Jason — And then just watch it as as they start talking and they realize that you you love them. And and you know right? Friends friendships happen. That’s why they’re there… Rich — Totally Jason — …and then it will grow. It’ll just grow. Just just be faithful just show up in those in a free world. You basically spent 300 bucks. It’s that easy. So. Rich — Love it. Jason — I think once they start doing that and they start having those robust conversations around the gospel with these unchurched people, then then it just takes fire people get excited. You can tell stories to your congregation, your IRL say… Oh my gosh, like like the one I always love telling is the is the “future queen of hell” – that was her avatar name – came in a year and a half ago… Rich — Love it. Jason — …She told us later – the story has a happy ending – but she told us later that she came in to troll, to mock us. And she was just overwhelmed by how welcoming we were – we’re like hey, we don’t care if you’re satanist. You know we believe in Jesus, but you’re welcome here. We love you. You know you know and so she came, befriended, became ah very regular, came to every service, every event. And even helped us build – because she’s ah a coder -helped us build our newest campus in Rec Room – beautiful campus. And then a few months ago she became a Christian, is being discipled now, and got baptized in the in the world that she built. She got baptized there about a month or two ago. So. Rich — So good. Jason — Like when you could tell those stories to your church, it’s like… And she’s she’s in the UK, 23/24, told us that she would never ever have gone to a brick and mortar church. All of her family. She’s the first Christian in generations there. Almost all of them are new age or wiccan or what have you. And and still those are stories that resonate with with your IRL people… Rich — Totally. Totally. Jason — …and and it just takes fire. It just takes fire after that. Rich — This is so good. So good. You. All You also provided a copy of an article. Um that we’re going to link to in the in the show notes. This is all about, um really it’s about the topic we’ve been talking about. You dive a bit deeper, you kind of tell this story, you know. Anything else you want to talk about this this pdf? This could be a great resource actually for church leaders. This is what I thought when I read it – I’m like this could be a great resource for church leaders like to pitch this out and say hey let’s think about this together, um, read this article and then let’s come to a meeting next week and talk about what should our first steps be into the Metaverse. Jason — Yeah. Rich — But but tell us a little bit about this article. Jason — Yeah, yeah, so I got selected to come to a ah ah shark tank is what they called it, you know the the tv show. But Exponential to this future church initiative, and I was at the first shark tank in Austin this last year, and they actually had ah about four of us, five of us from the Metaverse… Rich — Mmm-hmm. Jason — …doing Metaverse ministry, so it’s really cool at there. Exponential’s getting really excited about Metaverse stuff. They’re they’re really pushing it. So we did the shark tank thing, and they you know did a podcast, did ah a thing on Outreach Magazine, and and of course this article they wanted me to write. And so yeah, that’s all it is is basically just to kind of tell my story, my journey. And I’m I’m not an author – I don’t have any books or – that’s about it. Rich — Yes, yes yep. Jason — So yeah, that’s my article, but I thought you know that is ah it just basically shares Ah what I think a lot of pastors will be encouraged by. And I think you’re right, if they just were to show that to maybe to the staff, or to the elders, you know skeptical people, and say, wow ah, maybe this is legitimate. Maybe it’s doable. Rich — Totally. Jason — So yeah, if they can use it to that end that would be awesome. Rich — Love it. Well friends I’ve really appreciated… you’ve been just a huge service to us today, Jason. Jason — Oh thanks Rich. Rich — This has been so great, and in the spirit of what you’re talking about I’d actually love to offer anybody that’s listening in I’d love to offer up one Oculus headset. So… Jason — Wow. Rich — If you’re listening in, and you lead a church of less than 500 people, what I’d love you to do is to email me rb@unseminary.com and the first person that reaches out I’d be happy to send you one. But on this condition, you’ve got to tell us about your experience about it. So I’d love for you to actually do this, to take a step and actually see. And at least be willing to write a little bit – I don’t know – 500 words on what your experience was like good, bad, or the ugly. I’d love to publish that unSeminary and encourage people to actually take this step, because I think I’m with you, Jason, I do think that this is a is one of those areas that I think too many of us have been sleeping on. We were talking about this earlier I’ve heard this amazing statistic that one in three churches – 30% of churches – don’t have a website which is shocker to me that… none of these people that are listening in are in that… but um and we traditionally as a church have been really behind on these kinds of things and I want to encourage people to take that step. Anything else you’d love to share with us, Jason, as we kind of wrap up today’s episode, as we as we close things down here today? Jason — Yeah, it’s hard, well I mean there’s is there is all, you know, there are the – and this isn’t really probably for today because we’re closing down… Rich — Yeah. Jason — but like obviously there are some issues people have obstacles with um, our ecclesiology are um, you know some of the traditions. Um, how do you… how do you do real church in the Metaverse? Rich — Sure. Jason — And so that’s another conversation and actually I always… again you know they can feel free to send your listeners to to talk to me if they have questions about how I process through that because that can be a real roadblock for people. Rich — Sure. Jason — They’re like how do you do communion? Baptism? is that even, does God approve… Rich — Right. Jason — …that in the Metaverse? And I understand there are different traditions that are listening even now that that’s just not going to work for them. And that’s fine. I got Lutheran brothers that that just not going to work. But you know there are other view views. You know like a Zwinglian view, one that’s a memorialist view, and so it works for us. So I just I think some people. Um I would love to help them think through without getting have the… sometimes the shock value of it all pushes us away from the opportunity to reach the lost. Rich — Yes. Jason — And and I understand there is legitimate concerns so we can’t yeah, can’t go into that detail, but I… that has been an issue, I’ll be honest with you, Rich, of adoption. Rich — Mmm-hmm. Jason — Many people are like. That’s just, I can’t even get past that… Rich — Sure. Yeah. Jason – And I’m like, I understand – I was there I struggled with it wandered through it. But I anyway, I maybe it can be of service to bring some some thought as I’ve of really processed through it theologically, ecclesiologically if that helps it all. So. Rich — Um, yeah I love that. Listen I was in the same conversations 20 years ago when we were starting in multi-site and we started using video in in campuses and people were like, this is not real church. And and I would have never thought at that point…you know that’s estimated there’s there’s 5 million people today in the country who are at a video-driven campus of um of multisite. I would have never guessed 20 years later that’s where we landed – it felt like such a fringe thing. and in the same way I think that’s where we’re at with with VR church I think there’s lots of people are like there’s just no way. But we’re on the front end of what I think is ah is a change in culture… Jason — Yeah. Rich — …and and we’ve at least got to be exploring it as our churches. We can’t we can’t put our head in the sand on this one. So… Jason — Good word. Thanks! Thanks brother. Rich — Jason I really appreciate you being here. Where do we want to send people online if people want to track with you, track with the church, where give us those website addresses and all that again. Jason — Yeah I mean just website cornerstoneyc.com. I mean that’ll opening you up to… of course you can check where you can connect with me there. Ah you can go to the VR obviously slash VR… but all the headings are on the website. You can find the online church offerings that we have but cornerstoneyc.com. Rich — Great! Thanks so much for being here today. Jason — Yeah thanks, Rich – appreciate it.

Thanks for joining us for this week’s unSeminary podcast. We’re talking with Ken McAnulty, executive pastor at Arise Church in Florida. The hiring process is tough, and ramping up new staff can be awkward and stressful if it isn’t done with a lot of intentionality. Ken is with us today to talk about how to onboard new hires well and set them up for success. Create a great experience. // What do you want new hires to experience when they come to work at your church? What do you want people to understand? These are questions that Ken and his team began to ask as they created the onboarding process at Arise. Their goal was to set a healthy pace so that when a new staff completed their onboarding week, they would feel like they could run in their role without hindrances. The pace that a church sets during the first week of a new hire’s orientation is the pace that individual is going to live by for their first year. What works for them. // The first thing that Ken and his team do is to make sure that they have things set up for the new staff member before their first day. They communicate with new staff about things like setting up their office in a way that works for them and providing a computer of their choice with software they need. They also add fun aspects to the welcome by doing a bit of research on new hires through social media, or by talking with a person’s spouse, to surprise them with things they enjoy, such as playing a favorite song upon their arrival. Four things to impart. // There are four things Arise Church really wants to impart to their new staff members in their first week. They want them to walk away with a sense of the culture at Arise, a sense of care that they’re about more than what they do, a sense of competency or an understanding of how they can be successful, and finally the course or path in which way they should go. Sense of culture comes first. // Culture is much more important than competency. So the pastor takes the new staff member to lunch and talks with them about the history and culture of the church, as well as the future vision. After spending time with the pastor, the new hire then sits with other staff members who they will work closely with and hears their stories. Plugging new hires into relationships not only communicates culture, it humanizes the staff and creates open doors so they can get to know each other faster. The onboarding week wraps up with a truth or dare lunch which provides opportunities for the staff team to be authentic with each other and build rapport. Last Day at Arise. // The last culture component of the onboarding process is a document called Last Day at Arise. Working through the document helps new hires intentionally think about how they will be known at Arise and who they’re going to be. Finally they will review that document with their direct-up at the end of their first week. This creates accountability as well as future coaching opportunities to help the new staff member achieve their goals. Take time to express care. // When we expect new staff to hit the ground running right away and we become all business about getting them plugged in to their role, the person is lost in the tasks. We’re in the people business, and that needs to start with our staff. Each person we bring on board has a gift and a calling that we’re being given by God to steward. Take intentional time to express care for them and communicate that they are more than what they do for you. Every day of the onboarding week at Arise, certain staff have lunch with the new hire. The onboarding process can feel like a firehose, so Ken checks in with them throughout the week to see how they are doing and what questions they may have. Competency and course. // Competency is about how to do your job or role, and course is about knowing which way to go. When a new staff starts, they aren’t expected to solve any problems. Instead Arise follows the John Maxwell method of training where: I do and you watch, then we do together, then you do and I watch, and finally you can do alone. Define success. // Along with the details of how to do their job, Ken gives new hires a binder that has a welcome letter, a calendar for the first week, the contact information for everyone they need, core values, their budget, and more. Rather than charting their own course, show new staff a clear path they can follow. Clearly define wins so new hires understand how they can be successful in your organization. Looking for a structured way to onboard new staff at your church? Check out the Onboarding Week Planner for New Church Staff template, inspired by our conversation with Ken McAnulty on best practices for welcoming new hires. This customizable, step-by-step guide will help ensure a smooth and effective transition for your team. Access this resource as part of unSeminary Extra Credit to take your church leadership to the next level! Get the Onboarding Week Planner Here You can also learn more about Arise Church at www.myarisechurch.com. How do you want to be remembered? View this post on Instagram A post shared by unSeminary (@unseminary) 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: FiveTwo It’s hard to know how to grow your church. Especially as you come out of a pandemic in a changing culture. But you desperately want to. You believe the church can still grow. The good news? You don’t have to do it all yourself. In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to find the right group of people who will help carry the load and bring growth to your ministry. You’ll be relieved. People will be helped. Your church will grow. Download this guide TODAY for an easy 5-step plan to get the right leaders on board. We’ll give you 5 surprisingly easy steps to activate your congregation. Episode Transcript Rich — Hey, friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. Wow, so glad you’ve decided to tune in today. You know every week we try to bring you a leader from a church that will both inspire and equip you, and today is no exception. Super excited to have Ken McAnulty with us. He’s a fantastic leader – executive pastor – at a church called Arise Church. This is one of the fastest growing churches in the country currently the lead pastor’s a guy named Brent Simpson. They have – if I’m counting right – three campuses in Florida including one on a Native American ah one Native American, or an Indian congregation… Ken — Yeah. Rich — …and also translations into Portuguese, and Spanish, and Malay – is that the other language, I think? Ken — Malayalam. Rich — Malayalam – I knew I didn’t write that down right. Ken, welcome to the show. So glad you’re here. Ken — Thank you, Rich. Honestly, it’s kind of a bucket list item for me. I’ve been listening to you guys since I started my journey as Executive Pastor and and man you’ve helped me so much, so it’s It’s been… Rich — Come on ah come on. That’s so sweet of you to say, that’s so sweet of you to say. I’m I’m excited. We were joking ahead of time, I think so we – I’m letting you behind the curtain a little bit – we do a little prep before the show and Ken prepped enough for three conversations which is fantastic because I’m hoping to have him back on. Ah, so Ken I kind of gave I I butchered the bit of an introduction about Arise. Fill out the flavor – tell us a bit about the church. Give us a sense of your role. Talk, talk through, give us a kind of, fill in the the the map a little bit for people’s brains. Ken — Yeah, no worries. Um, so Arise was started in 1959 in Brandon. In fact, right around the corner from where our current location is, just started as a little a-frame church and about 11 years ago pastor Brent Simpson came and we were at about 70 people at that time, and man he just, he just saw the church just begin to explode and grow. They immediately went to 2 services soon were in 3 services and began looking for another location because they were in a sanctuary that seated about 150 people. Rich — Wow. Ken —And so found a location just literally right behind the property and began building in 2017, 2016/2017. I joined the staff in 2018. I had the the blessing, luxury, and fun of jumping in right after they moved into the new building… Rich — Oh fun! All the fun part about the building not the hard part. Ken — Right, right! I didn’t, I didn’t have the stress and tension of building like they did, but I got to see that just the, just the immense growth so when we moved into that building we were – and I’m just going to toss numbers because it helps understanding… Rich — Yeah. Ken — …We were about 550 people in man, by 2019, by the end of 2019 we’re sitting 1100… Rich — Wow. Ken — …And so just had some dramatic growth of people giving their life to Jesus. We’ve seen God do just some crazy, crazy, awesome things. Just awesome stories of God changing people’s lives, and I get to serve as the executive pastor and so what does that mean? Well I have our Indian Campus pastor. He jokes that I’m the executor pastor. So I execute people and things not not not people. I get stuff done, take care of the finances, take care of the facility, and and help manage a staff. So. Rich — I Love it. Love it. Why don’t we ah parallel this this staff team growth because you would have seen some interesting growth over the time you’ve been there because if you kind of came as you pivoted into the new building and then have seen that growth I’m assuming there was kind of ah a similar connection to the growth team, the growth of the staff team. Tell me about that. What’s that look like over the time you’ve been with the church? Ken — Yeah, there was you know since since I’ve been here or or right around that time we’ve hired 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6… probably half a dozen to 10 full-time staff members. You know some of that’s been transition, some of that has been has been new growth and so it’s been a large growth of our team, not only in those full-time spots, but then also in administration. We’ve had had to hire quite a few administrative assistants and and things like that. So there’s been a lot of hiring going on the last couple of years. Rich — Very cool. Love that. You know, onboarding staff, um, you know I think we as we hire staff, I think oftentimes – at least I know I do and and I think there’s a lot of friends who would be in a similar boat – we we identify a problem area that we’re looking for someone to solve and so we’re like, okay, we really need to maybe an area’s grown or like there’s a part of our church that just is not going well and so like we we really need to get some more time associated with this and so we hire some staff and we spend all this time, effort, and energy, money to get them, and then they arrive and we just want them to start solving problems, ah… Ken — Right. Rich – But getting those first couple days, weeks, months can be really tough to, kind of, what do we do? How do we onboard people? What does that look like for you? How have, you know… Ken — That’s a great question. Rich — …What would be some of the, or or why is that such a tension? Maybe we’ll start with the tension piece. Why is that such a tough time? Why is that such a tough place when we first have new staff arriving? Ken — Well, Rich, I know that many of your listeners have been through that transition point and I’ve been through that transition point and man it can be such an awkward time. This moment where, you know like you said, all this time, and energy, and effort, and money even, is spent on bringing this person in and then so often those folks are just released to the wild and expected to do ministry without an understanding of really what’s going on. And and really we discovered that it creates this awkwardness, this weirdness. You know, one of my staff told me this: one of the weirdest feelings is to be brought into a place with an unspoken culture, an unspoken taboo, and unspoken jokes… Rich — Mmm-hmm. Ken — …And have no idea what things you’re going to step on. Rich — Oh that’s so good. Ken — And and we really felt that tension. We really felt that, that problem. And so our lead Pastor, Pastor Brent, looked at me and one of my counterparts, my coworker Tina Blunt, and said, “I would like for you guys to really kind of develop an onboarding. I don’t know what that looks like.” And so we just began to dream, and and we said, you know, what what would it look like if we got to come onto, you know, a great team? What would we want that to look like? What do we want people to understand? What do we want their first week experience to to look like? And so we really just begin to tailor this one-week experience that we call our onboarding week. That that really helps resolve those problems and and sets the pace for our staff. Rich — Mmm-hmm. Ken — Because what we really want to do is, we want to, we want to set a healthy pattern and pace so that when they get done with that one week they feel like they can run, and there are less hindrances for them. One of the things that we’ve just kind of discovered is the pace that you set the first week is the pace that they’re going to live by for the first year. Rich — Oh that’s good. Ken — And too often there are churches who don’t set a pace and so then they wonder why their staff are not doing what they want them to do. Well I think it’s our fault. We’ve got to take that responsibility. Rich — Mmm, that’s so good – I love that. What a great word: hey, this pace if that we set at the beginning really is how they run, how they’ll, you know, how they’ll be a part of it. Ken — Yeah. Rich — So let’s pull that apart a little bit when you think about… I don’t know, well, the best way to do this… the first day. Maybe even pre-first day. Ken — Yeah. Rich — How how are you setting that pace? Well, how are we kind of setting up this conversation in the in the earliest moments? What’s that look like? Ken — No, it’s a great question. You know some of the first things that we want to do is we want to make sure that before they get there their first day that we have things set up for them. We don’t wait for them to arrive to begin to set things up. So we want to make sure that we have a dedicated space. We want to make sure we communicate with them about office furniture. You know, we have a budget set aside for them to get office furniture and we talk to them about pieces that we may have already that could be adopted to their office. And so we set up a basic office setup for them. We make sure that we order their computer so that means we have to communicate: Hey do you want a Mac, a PC, what do you want on it? Rich — Huh. Ken — And then we put together a communication binder that’s ready for them on their desk. And one of the cool things that we do (and this has been communicated to us by the staff that just kind of came organically) is we kind of, we kind of do some research on them and so we find maybe their favorite song or favorite type of music and we make sure that’s playing on their computer the day that they come in, their first day of work… Rich — Wow. Ken — …Which is kind of one of those really cool things. Um, we try not to be too too stalkerish with it, but you know we want to make sure that that that it’s welcoming. Rich — Yeah, how are you finding out their favorite song? What do you are you? You do like a forum ahead of time or like what’s that look like? Ken — So it it really depends on the person. Sometimes we’ll reach out to the spouse who is… Rich — Okay. Ken — …And we, you know, we kind of dig into that because their spouse oftentimes loves to have, you know, they they want, they’re invested in their spouse being, having a great first day experience and so we we include them in on that. Ah, sometimes we’ll do a little research on social media. A little social media stalking, we can find out there because some of that stuff is listed on Facebook and other social apps. Rich — I love it. That’s so good. A little bit of research goes ah a long way. Ken — It really does. Rich — That’s a great thing. It’s amazing how – we were joking earlier. We knew we were gonna head in this direction – I was talking with some friends recently about their first day experience and I was like, hey what was your worst first day experience? Ken — Yeah. Rich — It’s amazing how quickly those conversations come up. And simple stuff even just the computer – having, you know, so many people in that that circle were saying, Wow, like I showed up and there was, like no computer there. Or like they found a computer under a back desk somewhere and like threw it on my table. You know it’s like some terrible thing. It’s amazing how that’s that’s incredible. How how do we go maybe beyond so I love the physical setup stuff I think that’s fantastic. Ken — Right. Rich — What are we doing to kind of drive maybe a little bit deeper into what they can expect to be as a part of the team as a part of, you know, what it means to be in the part of the the church? Ken — Yeah, absolutely. So you know it’s it’s funny – this this conversation that you and I’ve had have helped what we call put put clothes on the baby that we birthed, and so we really have been able to kind of narrow down some things that we really want to give to people in that first week that we really want to impart to our staff. And so we we discovered four things that we really want to impart and since I’m a preacher by nature I did four C’s, you know, because that’s how we work… Rich — Yes. Ken — …It wasn’t three so I didn’t get the whole preacher thing in there. So we really want people to walk away from that first week with a sense of culture… Rich — Okay. Ken — …A sense of what am I walking into – what’s okay, what’s taboo. We want them to walk away with a sense of care that they’re about more than what they do. We want them to walk away with a sense of competency of an understanding of how they can be successful, and a sense of course – which way do they go. So ideally after that first week they’re going to feel like they can run now. We’re not going to solve everything that first week but those four big areas are the things that we’re trying to solve and we did things intentionally, unknowing beforehand because you know we were just creating the baby but really intentionally to kind of resolve these four issues. Rich — Yes, love it. So let’s… I love… so first of all preacher at heart. Love that. Let’s walk through those. Let’s talk about maybe each one of those, culture first. Ken — Yeah, yeah. Rich — Um, man this is such an important piece of the puzzle. I love that you’re saying like hey, what’s okay, what’s taboo. That’s an interesting way to think about it. What are you doing to ensure that people are kind of onboarding with the culture? Ken — Yeah, no, it’s a great question. First of all, we think that culture is way more important than competency. In fact, if you look at great organizations, like Chick-Fil-A, and we’re associated with a great supermarket down here in Florida called Publix – they do a great job of the type of stuff. Rich — Mmm-hmm. Ken — Those kind of organizations say that culture trumps competency just every day of the week. Rich — So true. Ken — And so we want to make sure that we communicate that well. And so we give our pastor two hours to to take that staff member to lunch and to walk them through the history and the story of our church to walk them through the future vision. One of the really cool things that he does—and I don’t want to spoil us for any future employees but— Rich — Ah, yes. Ken — …One of the one of the cool things that he does is he takes them out to a local highway right by and really begins to talk about the percentage of people driving by that are not saved that don’t know Jesus. Rich — Wow. Ken — And that’s the mission of the church just to really kind of get their eyes in the right place. And then we take thirty minutes at a time and we set them down in front of the staff that they’re going to work with and allow them to hear the stories of those staff members, which is really cool. In fact, the the staff that we’ve onboarded have said that that is the most impactful thing that we do this week is to sit them down in front of those people. Rich — Wow. Ken — One of our staff members said it like this, He said it humanizes the staff and creates open doors for deep conversations later. Another staff and I’m giving you quotes because I did my research another staff said, “the intentional getting to know each other faster rather than hoping it occurs over time.” And and so it’s it’s this intentionality of saying hey listen, we’re going to plug you into relationships because those relationships will communicate culture. And as part of those thirty minute stories what we tell our staff is, tell them why you love working at Arise. Because oftentimes the “why” somebody loves working at Arise surrounds the culture, and it surrounds the mission success. That’s why people love working at it. So when we allow our staff to communicate that it just it just, man, it increases the the impact of our culture. Rich — Wow. Ken — And then we do simple things like reviewing core values and proverbs and things like that. And then we do a couple of really cool things. We do… and and this is gonna sound a little funny… but, we do a truth or dare lunch with our staff. Rich — Okay, truth or dare lunch?! Things get spicy right off the top! Ken — They do. They do. We do that the last day of that week, but um, we really do that to to allow some authenticity there. And to really open up the door. What we’ve done at the beginning of the week is our staff has been authentic with this with this new staff person. And then at the end of the week it’s really their opportunity to be authentic back. And, man, when when they walk out of that moment, they walk out of that moment not feeling like they’re an outsider, but now all of a sudden they’re an insider. Rich — Okay, yeah. Ken — Because now they’re inside jokes that we all have together. And and so it’s not just about while I’m trying to find my way to fit into this team. Now I fit because I have inside jokes with them. And and then the last thing in this culture component that we do is we have a document that’s called our last day at Arise document. Rich — Hmm. Ken — We asked them to fill that out and then their last day of that week they check in with their direct-up and they go through that document. And what that document does is it really helps them to intentionally think about how they will be known at Arise. What they’re going to be known for; who they’re going to be. Rich — Oh Wow. Huh. Ken — Ah, because when we when we start at the end and we build a culture, looking at the end, we can be intentional about that. So if I say I want to be somebody who’s kind, who that when the staff… when I leave the staff say I was always listening to them, that empowers me to now be a listener… Rich — Oh gosh, this is so good. Ken — …And so we want to be really intentional about allowing those folks to really kind of create their own path in our organization and really build those strengths. Rich — Oh, I love this. Now you gave me a sneak peek at this document – would you… would it be okay with you if we and included this in the show notes for people? Ken — Absolutely. Rich — I think this ah, you know to be honest friends, this is one of those things you should just rip this thing off. It’s a Word doc and put your church name into it ah, if that’s okay, Ken. Ken — Yep! Absolutely. Rich — And ah this would be a great thing for even to kick off the new year as a staff team and say let’s actually think about this and then and then let’s build it into our onboarding. I I just love that. That’s so good. I can imagine that those docs – that’s a powerful moment for people as they think that through. Ken — It is, and and if I can just encourage your listeners, don’t leave it there; don’t just let people fill it out, but talk about it. Because with the talking about it comes accountability. Rich — Yes. Ken — Because then that can bring back conversations of, hey man this I know this is how you said you want to be perceived and this is who you want to be to people – let me help you with that. Let me help you become that person. But it becomes really kind of this powerful moment and I know for me it becomes a powerful reminder of who I’m trying to be when now people have come back to me and they’ve said that I am those things… Rich — Oh that’s so good. Ken — …That that you know we’ve had some staff leave and they said, you know, I love Pastor Ken because this is who he is. And when I look back at that document it matches and man that just, that just lights my world because that means that the person that God put on my heart to become, that I’m becoming – shows me a big win. So. Rich — I love that. The, um friends, that again and what a great resource. That’s that’s so fantastic. You want to get that in our show notes for sure. So you said culture – the second you said was care, talk talk to us about that. What, how are you showing care for your team as they arrive? Ken — Yeah. Absolutely, the the first thing that we want to do is we want to make sure there are gifts there. Rich — Okay. Ken — We want to we want to be known as a generous staff, and we want them to understand that there’s a generosity that comes with working here – that we’re going to be generous to each other. So we we buy them a book to read, but it’s not a book we want them to read… Rich — Hmm. Ken — We once again do our research and find out who their author is their favorite author and we buy them a book that they would care about. We buy them their favorite cereal. Why? Because cereal – it sounds weird but there’s little mind intentionality – cereal’s what we eat to the beginning end of the day… Rich — Okay. Ken — …and so we buy them cereal because it’s the beginning of their journey with us and so… Rich — Oh cool. Love it. Ken — …Just kind of one of those things. Then we buy them a coffee gift card or a favorite restaurant gift card -something that’s going to light their fire because what we also want them to know is, you’re about more than what you just do here in the office. We want you to have moments of care outside of the office, moments where you can just take care of your family, where you can go and you can be apart from us. It’s not just about what you do here. Rich — Ah. Ken — We also we we schedule with this clear understanding, for us Fridays and Saturdays are a day off and so their first week we have a literal schedule of every thirty minutes or fifteen minutes that they spend with us for their first week that I create for every staff member that we on board… Rich — Wow. Right. Wow. Ken — …And on Friday and Saturday we clearly put: OFF – do not come into the office. Rich — We do not want to hear from you. Ken — Yeah, and and that’s really the goal because we want to create this habit of Sabbath for them. Rich — Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, that’s good. Ken — We want them to understand that they’re more, they’re about more than what they do for us. They’re a person and we want them to feel cared for. Every day we have lunch with them. One of the most awkward things I found, Rich, is when I’m going to a new place, what do I do for lunch, you know? Rich — Um yes. Ken — Do I bring my lunch? Am I am I supposed to have lunch? So I let them know up front, hey don’t bring your lunch all week we have lunch plans for you. Lunch is on the church. It’s on us and we’re going to strategically send them with different people so that they can build those relationships. Um, so it may be their direct reports. It may be their direct-ups. The first day I said it was the pastor and so we we send them with different folks each day and it really kind of builds culture around these lunch breaks these times off. Um, one of the cool things that one of my staff told me is he said: it helped me to understand the culture of lunch because nobody was looking at their watch trying to rush back. And we don’t have that kind of culture – for us we’re not demanding people be back at 1 and so it helped him to understand what was expected of him in that in that lunch hour… Rich — Love it. Ken — …and which was really cool and so some of that’s just caught. And then I do at least two check-in appointments – fifteen to thirty minutes – usually one is at the end of the first day and then usually one at the end of the week where I ask, Okay how you doing? You’re drinking from a fire hose. Are you okay? What do you have questions about? Rich — Yes. Ken — And just ah, just to check in with them. Rich — I love it, Ken. I love being challenged by leaders like you. I thought we were doing a good job with our first day staff having the first day organized moment by moment. I love that that first week. And you know we’ve received – for friends that are listening, and I think that’s crazy, but I can tell you – we got I’ve got so much positive feedback from people say, listen I just love the fact that you’ve gone out of the way to ensure that might… because people don’t know what to do. They show up and… Ken — Yep. Rich — …they’re they’re excited. It’s overwhelming because you’ve been given them out a whole area – it’s like go solve the problems, and it it feels like you know, take on the world, change the world, because that’s what they’ve, you know, they’ve bought into the vision of the church… Ken — Yeah. Rich — …but they don’t know where to start and and the fact that you block that out for an entire week is is so good. So good. Ken — Well and here’s one of the other things that does, and leading into this idea of competency, Rich, is we don’t let them solve problems that first week. I don’t want them solving any problems that first week. Rich — Okay, tell me about that. Yeah, so let’s talk about that. Ken — …because I want them to learn how to solve problems in our context. Rich — Hmm. Good. Ken — You know too often if they’re going to come in and try to solve problems in the way that they’ve always solved them. They’re going to run into cultural cultural issues and cultural conflicts and so I want them to to be prepared I want them to soak it all in. So we don’t necessarily give them any problems to solve that first week. In fact their first Sunday with us, we tell them come and observe. Come and shadow. We we tell you’re not gonna open the building. You’re not going to run a meeting. You’re gonna come and watch. We really follow this training – this John Maxwell of idea idea of: I do and you watch. Then we do together. Then you do and I watch. And then you can do. we want to ah, intentionally expose people to teamwork which is going to accelerate their culture. Rich — So good. Ken — So that’s one of the competency things that we do. And really what we found is while it may seem that it slows their competency process or their ability to input into the organization, that’s actually not true. Rich — Hmm. Ken — What it does is it accelerates their ability to input into the organization… Rich — Right. Ken — …because they’re almost like that horse in the gate that is just chomping at the bit ready to go… Rich — Sure. Ken — …and you’re keeping them in the gate and telling them hey listen this is all how all the horses run and so man when we let them go. They’re ready to go, but they’re also ready to go in the right direction… Rich — Yeah, I can see that. Ken — …and and they’re running really fast and so we found that it’s actually better to do it this way than just to try to release somebody because oftentimes when you just release somebody. They don’t even know which direction to go. Rich — That’s so true. Yeah. Ken — And I’ve been there before. You know you walk in and you’re like okay you want me to solve this problem but I don’t even know what caused the problem I don’t know anything. So it’s it’s just one of those things that we really want to be intentional about. Rich — I Love it. Ken — And then we also give them a ah, really clear job description… Rich — Okay, yep. Ken — …and and within that, and I’ve given you an example of this as well – actually my job description. Um, but we want to clearly define wins because we want them to be able to celebrate when they’re successful and and that way they know when they’re accomplishing what we’ve asked them to do and we tell them up front that that job description is always maneuverable. We’re going to add and subtract to it in our annual reviews and things like that. But… Rich — Love it. Ken — …Um, we want them to understand clearly how they can be successful at our organization. Rich — Okay, so I want to ask you a bit of a meta question. So it’s like ah so you know you started with culture, then care, then competency, then course. I think a lot of us would have those in reverse order – we would start with, like and, I’ve I’ve done this, I’ve done this… Ken — Yeah. Rich — …like I’m I’m confessed. You’re my pastor, I’m confessing to you. It’s like here are the 48 buckets that are on fire. Can you just solve this now? Um, but you’ve taken ah an approach like, no no slow down, and let’s learn who we are first. Is that on purpose, is that… Ken — It is. Rich — Is that is and and because you’ve backend loaded the the kind of what I’ll call the job responsibilities piece. Talk to me a little bit about that. Ken — The temptation that we have as pastors, because oftentimes when we have this gap that we want to hire for the temptation that we have is to plug that person in right away, and to get them to do it because we’re stressed and we’re overloaded. And what happens there when we become all business about bringing someone in, the person gets lost. And we have to go back to this core of we are in the people business. Not not even the ministry business; we’re in the people business. And so each person that we bring in is a person with a gift and a calling and a future that we are being ah handed by God as stewards to steward that forward. Ken — And so we’re taking this really intentional, intentional time out to really kind of create these moments for people to to be people and define their future. You know it kind of goes back to this last day at Arise. I mean what, what organization really asks somebody… and the last question on there is: what are you leaving a rise to do? Rich — Yes. Ken — You know what organization asks somebody on their first day, hey what are you going to leave us to do? But but we realize that folks will leave us, and that’s okay, but the goal is that they not leave the kingdom. Rich — Yes, So good. Yes, well, that’s totally fine. Yes. Ken — We want them to keep going in the kingdom and man we want them to exceed us. We want them to do better than us. We want them to plant churches that grow bigger than us because we’re about the kingdom and so that means we’ve got to be about the people first and that starts with our staff. And here’s one of the things that the last thing I’ll say to this. Oftentimes when we forget our staff and we pursue the business in place of our staff, it is symbolic of what we’re going to be doing and what we are doing with our people – that we’re pursuing numbers and we’re pursuing digits as opposed to people. Rich — Um, yeah, it’s so true. So true. Ken — And and really, we’ve got to check our hearts and get back to the foundation of this. It says, I’m going to care about people and because I care about people, God will bless me with those numbers because God blesses us when we take care of the little things. And really those things right now are not things, they’re people and we’ve got to take care of them. Rich — Yeah. Yeah, that’s so true. No, that’s so true. That is so true. Love it. Love it. Love it. Now the last, ah competency and course help us understand those two. What? what’s the nuance between between those two help me understand the difference there. Ken — So sure. Competency is just kind of you know this this: how I do my job, my role. For for course, it’s this idea of: which which way do I go. One of my staff members that I talked to about this, he said, it’s like ah the church and and the staff, the pastors, putting our hands on the shoulders of a new employee and kind of telling them: This is the way. You know, to quote the mouse guy. You know this is the way. Rich — Yes. Ken — Um, and so the employee doesn’t really have to invent their own path. Rather the path is laid out for them. And so I create this binder that they receive on their first day. It’s got a welcome letter. It’s got that calendar of their first week. we give them important contact information. How many staff, how many jobs have you gone to where you don’t even know how to reach out to the other pastors, or you’re you’re running through your phone: hey what’s your phone number, you know? Rich — Oh it’s so true. Yes, yes yeah. Ken — That’s the last thing that we want to have to have happen. You know we we want to give them that information we want to pre-think about what they need. We give them core values and leadership proverbs. We give them their budget. How much money can I spend? You know, that’s the question. Employee handbook, that last day at Arise worksheet. And and one of the things that, you know, we’re we’re still growing, man. We haven’t perfected this process and we’re going to get better. In in my meetings with people getting ready for this, that’s one of the things that I asked, how can we do this better? And one of the one of the guys told me, he said, man provide some kind of FAQ… Rich — That’s good. Ken — …some kind of fact sheet, you know. He said there’s there’s little things that I just didn’t know. I didn’t know that we had free Cokes in the fridge. I didn’t know where the snacks were… Rich — Who are those Cokes? Whose Cokes are those? You don’t want to take the senior Pastor’s Cokes! You know you don’t want to do that! Ken — Yeah, right, right! I didn’t know where the bathrooms were, you know. And it’s just simple things like that. And so that’s even going to be one of those things that as we’re getting ready to onboard new staff, we’re going to be adding into there just some simple FAQs. Rich — Um, love it. Love it. Ken — Um, just to answer some simple questions that people would have. And then we make sure that those folks get to meet with our direct-ups. Rich — Yeah, it’s so good. This is so good. Can you give us a sense of this is kind of related but ah, a sense ah of what your staff rhythms are? Once people start so are you doing like monthly one-on-ones. What is your kind of all staff meeting process look like? What do you do, annual goals, that kind of stuff? How does all that plug into this kind of onboarding process? What’s that look like? Ken — Yeah. So weekly we have what we call an executive team meeting which is all of our location pastors and myself and our other executive. So weekly will have that and then we’ll break out from there into staff meetings with each location. And so weekly we have a staff meeting with each location and then no less than biweekly will have individual one-on-ones with our staff. And so you know we try to meet regularly and and I’m going to tell you you know this is a whole nother showing to itself, but man that that care piece does not stop at the onboarding because I’ll have an hour or one-on-one meeting and the first thirty minutes is about them. It’s not about me and it’s ah not about what I need from you. It’s about you. It’s about your wife. It’s about your kids. It’s about how you’re adjusting. It’s about whether or not you need to buy a house. It’s it’s about you and so that’s that’s kind of the rhythm that we have. And then annual reviews. Yeah. Rich — Love it. Love it. Yeah and then annual reviews – that’s great. The I love that that’s a that’s a great insight. One of the things I’ve said in my one-on-ones is yeah that isn’t the place for me to assign work to you if if we’ll do that. And usually we do that in a team environment… Ken — Right. Rich — …or there’s other other areas where hey we’re talking about that. This is really a place where I’m here to be a coach to you. I’m here to help you what you know. What what are the areas that you feel stuck or blocked that we can help you get unstuck? It’s It’s not about me. If if you walk out of this meeting with a pile of to-dos, I’m not doing my job. Ken — Right. Rich — So yeah, that’s that’s fantastic. This is so great. Now you’ve provided a number of documents. Let’s kind of talk through those a little bit. So you’ve got ah a day 1 schedule example. Anything you want to kind of talk through that and give it a sense of what that look what that document’s about? Ken — So literally like I said we schedule out every fifteen minutes, and and that doesn’t mean that there’s something in every block but you know they’re they’re blocked with spaces in between. And then and then we also make sure to schedule in breaks. We tell people up front that they’re going to be drinking through a firehose, but you know we want to schedule in breaks for them as well. But our staff have told us that literally that coming in on on a first day not knowing what to do and then having a book handed to you that tells you everything that you’re going to do for the first week is so relieving for them. And we give them moments where they can set up their office and do those normal first week things, but it’s so relieving not to have to try to figure out what you’re supposed to do that first week. And so it’s it’s a lot of work on my on my end up front and really kind of coordinating all that but man it’s worth it because they have ah a real good sense of what they’re doing. Rich — No, yeah, that’s so good – I love that. And you know when you think about on the work side man, the church is investing a lot of lot of money, frankly in hiring these new staff, and and we all know that like that’s a, you know it’s a huge investment we want to make sure that we leverage it well. Ken — Yeah. Rich — You’ve provided a table of contents of ah of ah a binder that you give to them. Can you talk this through the binder a little bit? What is that tool? Um, you know how does it all fit into this as well. Ken — Yeah, yeah, yeah, we talked about that in the little course section and it’s it’s that binder that really kind of guides them the first week. And so it you know I wanted to give that to you for your listeners so that they can have some ideas of of things that they can put in there. You know you guys are gonna have to create your own stuff. You know I can’t give you your employees cell phone numbers or anything like that. But those those are the things that we try to provide for them and man… Rich — Yes, yes, yeah, love it. Ken — …We’re always looking to grow that thing and so if anybody has any creative ideas of things that we can put in there, we’d love to hear it because we’re always trying to make sure that we provide better for our staff. Rich — Love it. This is so good I really appreciate your help here. This is really I think a gold standard on you know, onboarding new staff. So you’ve just done us a huge favor by providing some great coaching here. Is there anything else, you’d like to share with us just as we wrap up today’s episode? Ken — There is. We’ve done something twice that we just kind of stumbled on where where we actually paid for our last two full-time staff members to come on, to have a week off. So so we brought them on payroll… Rich — Oh in between their their last job and yeah, yeah, yes. Ken — …And we started their payroll in between their last job and this job and what we found is that that really gives our employees just this really moment to to have a fresh start, to turn their head. And yes it costs, but we’re we’re looking at. You know our staff are our most valuable resource, not our building, our staff. And we want longevity. Man, I’ve heard horror stories of churches who don’t allow a staff to take a vacation for a year when they get on and things like that and staff leaving one church on Sunday and starting their next church on Monday or on Wednesday and man this is so unhealthy. It’s not healthy. They can’t they can’t shift their mind or turn their mind to to what you’re asking them to do. They’re still recovering and reeling from the the trauma of leaving a place, and the grief sometimes of being pulled away from a place and missing people, different things like that. And we’ve got we’ve got to steward people better than that. We need to give them some time. And yeah I think this is something that we’re gonna continue going forward because both those staff members have really said that that that gives them that opportunity to reset, and it’s just one of the healthiest things that they were able to do, so yeah. Rich — Yeah, that’s so great. Ken, this has been so helpful. I am just so honored that you took some time out, to not only pull this together, but then help us think through these issues. I want to make sure people track with Arise and and plug in with the church and and follow along with you guys. Ken — It’s my pleasure. Yeah. Rich — Ah, where do we want to send them online to connect with either you or the church? Ken — So I am not big on social media. Our church is, so that you can find us at myarisechurch at Brandon online. You can also email me Ken@myarisechurch.com. Pretty easy to find the website’s myarisechurch.com. I’d love to hear from any of them and love to hear more ideas on what we can do better. Rich — Love it. Thanks so much, Ken. Appreciate you being here today.

Jesse DeYoung, the executive lead pastor at Flatirons Community Church, shares his journey of reviving a broken team culture amidst challenges. He discusses the importance of selecting staff who align with the church's vision and how effective leadership can navigate periods of crisis. Jesse emphasizes building trust, succession planning, and the roles of humility and accountability in fostering a healthy church environment. His insights highlight the transformative power of teamwork and emotional awareness in church leadership.

Today we’re chatting with Julie Hawkins, the Next Steps Pastor at Chapel Hill Church in Washington state. So many churches had to quickly develop an online presence at the beginning of 2020 and it made the area of helping people take their next steps more challenging. Listen in as Julie shares how Chapel Hill Church took advantage of opportunities to pioneer new methods of building deeper relationships and increasing connection and engagement, and how they are using what they’ve learned moving forward. Try new things. // It can be hard for larger churches to make sudden changes. However, the early days of COVID gave Chapel Hill Church the opportunity to try new things quickly and see what worked or what needed to be changed. With these pioneering efforts came more exploration of what could be done online and this actually led to deepening of relationships and increased engagement.Virtual mission trips. // One of the things the church did was organize some virtual Go teams with their global outreach partners across the world. What they discovered was doing an online mission trip allowed the church to engage a segment of their congregation that would never be able to actually visit countries like Cambodia or Thailand. Similarly, the church was able to engage with their ministry partners in a deeper way by listening to their needs over Zoom and praying for them. Chapel Hill also included cultural aspects to the online experiences, such as sharing a recipe or music from the country, or providing fair trade gift boxes. Build local outreach relationships. // Similarly, with local outreach partners people at the church learned that while showing up to serve is a great opportunity to build relationship, you can continue to build that relationship outside of the actual experience. Take time to pray for various ministry partners and connect with them online.Online evangelism. // Chapel Hill was surprised by how well groups like Alpha did when moved online during the pandemic. People were still willing to dig into the deep questions of life. In fact, they saw more people come to faith through their online Alpha groups via Zoom than they’d seen in person. Online life groups. // During the initial phase of the pandemic, life groups were also moved online to Zoom, and more people joined those groups than ever before. Having the meetings on Zoom moving forward allows people to stay connected even when they’re out of town or unable to get together. People love these little communities that have been developed.Training online. // Chapel Hill adapted much of their training to be online too, and hope to continue with this method moving forward. Online training allows people to watch the videos at their own speed when it fits into their schedule, and then build a relationship in person.Connecting via text. // When it comes to connecting with people and reengaging new people, or those who haven’t returned to in-person services yet, Julie uses the tool Focus Growth. Focus Growth helps with first-time guest follow-up by reminding the staff to begin a conversation with guests via text message. Text messages are a primary way we communicate and so it allows the church staff to reach out without overwhelming new people or being too pushy. The response from guests has been overwhelmingly positive.Future relationship-building projects. // Using technology to help us better care for people has many applications. Just a few that Julie has on her radar are creating a structured framework for engaging volunteers at the church, creating a system of congregational care within the large church so that people feel well cared for, and working with the leadership to make sure they are caring well for themselves and the staff. You can learn more about Chapel Hill Church at www.chapelhillpc.org. Thank You for Tuning In! There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, but you chose unSeminary, and I’m grateful for that. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it by using the social media buttons you see at the left hand side of this page. Also, kindly consider taking the 60-seconds it takes to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, they’re extremely helpful when it comes to the ranking of the show and you can bet that I read every single one of them personally! Lastly, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, to get automatic updates every time a new episode goes live! Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: Risepointe Is your church ready? Are you re-opening? Ready to welcome MORE people to worship and grow with your church? Are you out of space or are your interiors dated and needing improvement? The architecture and design team at Risepointe want to help you align your facility with the mission and vision that God has given your church. That’s why Risepointe developed The Needs Analysis. The Needs Analysis is a comprehensive look at your site to seat experience through the lens of your first time guests. Learn more by visiting www.theneedsanalysis.com. Let them know you heard about The Needs Analysis on unSeminary for $500 off! Episode Transcript Rich — Hey, friends welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in today – every week we try to bring you a leader who will both inspire and equip you and I’m super excited to have Next Steps Pastor at Chapel Hill Church, Julie Hawkins, with us. This is a fantastic church you should be tracking with and I’m excited to talk to Julie and to learn from her. She’s on the people side of what we do really helping people journey through Alpha, getting them connected through life groups, serving both locally and globally – Julie, welcome to the show. So glad that you’re here today. Julie — Yeah, thanks for having me. Rich — Why don’t we start with you telling us about Chapel Hill – kind of fill out the picture for us, tell us a bit of the story. It’s one of the fastest growing churches in the country – tell us, you know, give us a kind of a flavor of the church and then your role. Julie — Yeah, Chapel Hill it is not in North Carolina – people get confused about that – but it’s in Gig Harbor, Washington and it started as a chapel on a hill (clever name) and we have grown over the years. I’ve been at Chapel Hill, ah, personally for about 30 years. I grew up there so it is such a blessing to serve at the church that I grew up at. Rich — Oh nice. Julie — And we are a church that is really committed to being for our city and our community and also being for our our world. So that’s one of the things that I love about Chapel Hill – my role as the next steps pastor is I am there to help people take whatever their next step is in the discipleship pathway or process and so I help people connect to community through our life groups and through celebrate recovery. I help people connect to service through local and global outreach or serving at the Church. Um, and then I also help people connect to reaching others with the gospel through Alpha. Obviously I don’t do all of that on my own; I have a fantastic team that helps me with that. Ah, but I get to be kind of the point that people come to to help connect them into their next step and help connect them to the church. Rich — Love it. Well I am really looking forward to learning from from you and from the church. I think one of the things, for longtime listeners of the show, you know I love particularly talking to church leaders who are leading in context where you would say, like, “That’s not a place that churches should grow,” and Washington is one of those places. Julie – Yeah. Rich — This is a tough community to reach and Chapel Hill has been one of those churches that’s just made a huge impact on its community. So I’m really got my notepad out I’m really looking forward to learning today. Particularly you know when I think about these last (we were joking about this earlier) these last eighteen months or so during Covid and on the people side – the kind of connection side. Wow, it’s been a tough season for that. Let’s talk about – remind us back to March 2020. What were some of the early impacts of Covid on Chapel Hill? What did it look like in those early days? Let’s start there. Julie — Oh man that seems like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it? Rich — Doesn’t it? It’s amazing right? It’s crazy. Julie — Ah, yeah, yeah, but it’s pretty incredible to think back ah to 2020 March 2020 We felt like we were on the cusp of a lot of things like we had seen as a season of significant growth. Our Alpha was really growing and we were seeing more people from outside of the church come to Alpha which is a really key transition when you’re running a course like that. Rich — Love it. Yeah, totally. Julie — And we we felt like we were just about ready to step into all of these really incredible things and then all of a sudden the world literally shut down and we had to. That word that everybody used so often in 2020, we had to pivot and then pivot and then pivot, and so it was really a strange time because there was almost a … as we looked back, it was like, “Wow, God was doing so much and then we had to pump the brakes. What in the world is going on? Why did that happen?” Rich — Yeah, amazing. You know one of the things that I think we all experienced during that was this sense of, it was like this disorienting like, “Okay now what are we going to do?” When you look back to these last eighteen months, what were some of those things that you were able to, you know, try new to, you know, to kind of experiment with. What were some of those things that, you know, you found yourself doing things as a church that you just normally wouldn’t have done? Julie — Yeah, so for us we didn’t have a livestream of our services before Covid… Rich — Okay, okay, oh gosh. Oh my goodness. Yes, yes. Julie — …and so all of a sudden it was like, hey we gotta do this, so we very quickly developed an online presence. And because we developed that online presence we started playing with, what does that look like to do it more? And I think that one of the things that I really appreciated about Chapel Hill and our leadership team and the way we approach this season is we just had the willingness to try things. At large churches it can be hard to change quickly and I think that the early days of Covid gave us the opportunity to try things quickly and say: did this work? Do we want to change it? Do we want to can it and go a completely different direction? Rich — Mmm-hmm. Julie — It kind of let us, you know, pioneer a little bit in ways that large, established churches don’t have the opportunity to do. And so a couple of those things, just thinking back on ah things that we did, is we did ah some virtual Go teams with our global outreach partners and what we found with that was it allowed us to engage a population of our congregation that would never be able to go to Cambodia or Thailand and they were able to engage with our global outreach partner in a way they weren’t able to before. And we did it once and then we thought well what if we did it more and had like a recipe that you cook from the country or some music that you listened to from the country so we even grew that. Rich — Mmm-hmm. Julie — Um we had conversations with our local outreach partners that helped people know how to pray for them and really engage intentionally with our local outreach partners, recognizing that um, showing up to serve is a great opportunity to build relationship, but you can continue to build that relationship outside of either the team that goes and visits or the team that goes to serve, so I liked that a lot. Julie — we did a thing where we um launched a mental health Monday with our care ministries… Rich — Oh love it. Julie — …And our director of care would talk through things that people were dealing with especially when we were in lockdown on quarantine. What’s happening with your mental health? She even did one where she interviewed all of the kids in next steps – all of our staff’s children – and talked about what they were dealing with. Rich — Oh wow, that’s cool. Yeah. Julie — So we did mental health Mondays and we did A-Way-to-Serve Wednesday, engaging people in service and and they were just very like low quality, quick videos that we did. And we even give the freedom to say, “Man if you want to talk for five minutes about this, or if you want to talk about for fifty minutes about this, this is the time to try it.” Rich — Yeah, give it a whirl. Julie — So those are a couple things. Exactly, like, why not? I have one more thing. Rich — I’d love to hear about– okay, go one more thing. Julie — The other thing that we did that I was super excited about was ah we tried online Alpha and that was, again, one of those things that it was like, how in the world can you dig into life’s big questions online? And it was funny because I had gone to a call about online Alpha the week, like 2 weeks before covid, and then all of a sudden it’s like everything’s online. And I’ve been… it was… I’m excited that we’re through that season now and we’re not doing online health anymore, but we saw more people come to faith through Zoom than we did with our in-person Alphas so it was just incredible to see the fruit from that. Rich — Yeah, I know I um, so it was the June of that year I was involved in an online conference and Nicky Gumble was – from Alpha – was a part of that and, yeah, one of the things he was talking about was he apparently was was resistant to online Alpha. For years he said, you cannot do this online. You have to have the meal. We got to do the Weekend. You cannot do this and, and so then he tells the exact same story of like, “Well then I’m an Alpha leader and so we were leading online Alpha and saw the exact same thing – saw all these people come to know the Lord and just saw really cool outcomes from that.” That’s that’s really amazing! I love you just rolled… Julie — Yeah, I mean the Holy Spirit can work, the Holy Spirit can work through Zoom. Who knew? Who knew? Rich — Absolutely! Absolutely! Who knew? Exactly – it’s amazing…Which I just loved that as a leader for him. You know, he’s got a few laps on the track, you know, to be saying, “Hey I’m still learning and growing and trying new things,” which I thought was great. So I love that you just kind of rolled over the virtual Go teams. I want to hear more about that. So you did these international service opportunities – pick that apart a little bit – help us understand what was it? What did you do? What kind of impact? Yeah, talk me through that. Julie — Yeah, so our strategy with our global outreach focus in general is to build relationships with our global outreach partners. And so because of that we have fewer partners than some other large churches might… Rich — Yep. Julie — …Because we intentionally want to go deep in relationship with them. And we also want to emphasize that our it’s a relationship and it’s not based on transaction. And so because of that, it actually really lent itself to this virtual Go team model that we were having conversations with our global outreach partners over Zoom. Rich — Mmm-hmm. Julie — And people were able to ask them questions about what life is like in their context, they were able to ask them questions about the ministry that they were involved in. We were really ah, able to ah, lean into intentional prayer ah, praying for the partner over Zoom. And and then we added a couple other things like um, we did fair trade gift boxes, if we were able to, from the country where they they would get like a maybe like a little ornament. Maybe a fair trade trade group from Haiti, or something like that. So just like, you know, when you go on a Go team, you come back with something tangible that you… Rich — Yes… Julie — …Like that you show everybody, and so we had that same component to it, and recipes and music and things like that. And then really the service thing, especially during Covid um, a lot of our partners, they weren’t receiving teams, but they were still, they were having to pivot and do ministry as well. Rich — Mmm-hmm. Julie — And so being able to tell the story of their ah, changes in ministry was really important, but then also helping them fund some of that was a huge part of it. So I feel like the serving piece of it became a: we’re going to help support you as you’re shifting from being a seminary in Mexico to being a food bank for your local community. Rich — Right. Absolutely. I love, I love that. And I know so many of our international partners (um, and I wonder if you’re experiencing this as well) I know in a lot of churches, we’re unable to go still. Like it’s, and, and they, you know the horizon on that is measured in years. Like it may not be, you know, may not be next year even. It might be into 2023 before we’re able to to do that again. And so, and I think a lot of us are still trying to figure out ways: How do we keep building those relationships? How do we keep connected with these people? So I love that – what a cool – I love that kind of virtual Go team thing. Rich — Now, when you think back to this season, you’ve tried a lot of things, is there anything that you’ve done that you think will impact the church as you look to the future? You’re like, oh here’s some things that we’ll continue to do, ah down the road for, you know, you know, because of this season when you think about it. Julie — Yeah I’m sure there’s many. The one that comes to mind initially is that we moved a lot of our life groups on to Zoom… Rich — Mmm-hmm. Julie — …And initially moved all of our life groups onto Zoom, and we saw more people join life groups in that initial season than we ever had before, because, I think it’s people that were involved in our community but maybe hadn’t joined a group, and all of a sudden your life group was where you were doing life in these, like, tiny little communities. Rich — Yes, yes. Julie — So we saw these people join and a lot of life groups move to Zoom and what people realized is you can still stay connected to your community Even when you are out of town or, especially for our men’s life groups, Ah they would instead of meeting at a coffee shop at 5 o’clock in the morning, they’re able to meet on Zoom and build those intentional relationships. Or if everybody on the group is traveling you can meet on Zoom, so it allows people to stay connected. So that’s one that I think of initially. Rich — Right. Julie — And we also adapted a lot of our training that we, we had been doing in person. Rich — Oh yeah, cool. Julie — We adapted a lot of our training to be online and I think that’s something we’ll continue. I think that we’ve realized that flipping the classroom and having the teaching component be a computer and then having the relationship in person is, um, is a good model, and that people are able to watch, um, whatever the training piece is at their own speed and then they’re able to come and build a relationship in person. So that’s something I think we’ll, we’ll hopefully continue to do and maybe do more and even better. Rich — Yeah, love it. That’s so good. It’s, for sure. Yeah on that training piece, that’s definitely – you can see that where you know it’s like we’re all used to – not just Zoom – but we’re used to kind of online stuff more now than we were two years ago. That’s, that’s fantastic. Well I’d, I’d love to take advantage of the fact that you are, you live and breathe getting people connected and I think all of our churches are facing this, in this, again, post-covid, intra-covid, whatever this season we’re in. We’re all asking the question, how – now people have been impacted, we’ve seen that. There there maybe is some hesitancy for people to reengage, hesitancy to join teams, hesitancy to jump into a small group or Alpha um, what are you seeing that’s helping on that front in this season? How are you, you know, helping people at Chapel Hill take those steps, or, you know, is there, is there anything that you’ve seen that is, has been, kind of, helping people in this, kind of, as we’re exiting covid or whatever it is again? (I’m not sure what we’re in!) …You know as we’re in this current season to, kind of, get plugged into community. Julie — Yeah, yeah, it feels like perpetual Covid. I don’t know if we’ll ever be out of it. Rich — Yes, yes, exactly. Julie — But ah, we’ll just continue adopting as we go. Ah so, ways that we’ve connected people—it is a constant thing that we’re wrestling with, certainly, and ah reengaging people that haven’t come back to in-person worship yet, and also reengaging new people—a couple of tools that I have found to be useful is, ah we’ve been utilizing a tool called Focus Growth which is a first-time guest follow-up, ah platform. Rich — Okay. Julie — Well actually it’s, it’s way more than first-time guest but we’re using it for our first-time guest follow-up and it’s a way to um, help people indicate that they’re new and then begin a conversation with them via text message. And um, and then also what it does for me that’s very helpful is it sets them in, it puts them into a process queue so it reminds me to go back and follow up with them and say, like you know, this person… Rich — Yes. Julie — …They’ve been here for two weeks and, um, it would be a great time to invite them to Chapel Hill 101, our initial class to get to know the church. Rich — Mmm-hmm. Julie — So it kind of is, I found that the best way to connect people is to have an intentional leader who is connecting with them and so Focus Growth has helped, like it’s helped nudge me when I need to connect with all of the people that are coming in. Rich — Love it. Julie — And it’s been great, like um, we’ve gotten so far, we’ve had a 100 percent return rate from people. Rich — Wow! Julie — Yeah like incredible! So they get, when they receive that text message from me asking how they connected to Chapel Hill, we’ve had 100 percent of a return rate answering the question of how they ended up at the church. So I feel like I, more than standing at our – we have ah, ah we call it the wood wall – it’s where people come to connect after the service… Rich — Mmm-hmm. Julie — …More than that I see building relationship through these text messages and then being able to get to know them a little bit better and say, hey maybe this is your next step. Rich — Love it. Julie — So that’s been really helpful. Rich — Yeah I love that and there’s something about the… obviously everyone’s on their phone, and there’s… you can see that where there’s like ah, there’s a the, the trick has always been, at least I have found from my seat on getting people connected, it’s like you you want to give people enough anonymity that they don’t feel like we’re jumping down their throat. Like you want to give them some space but you don’t want to give them too much anonymity because then they’ll never connect, right? Julie – Yeah. Rich — It’s like we know that human relationships happen when people get to know each other and so, you know, I can see where a kind of texting solution would be an interesting middle ground there. Julie — Yeah, exactly. Rich — Yeah, that’s cool. Julie — And it’s so easy in a large church to slip through the cracks, do people… Rich — Yes. Julie — …For people just to kind of anonymously come in and never be noticed or never engage, and obviously we don’t want that because we believe we grow in our relationship with Jesus when we grow a relationship with one another so we want to connect with people, but we also don’t want to overwhelm people. You know we don’t want people, we don’t want to, ah we don’t want to come on too strong, and a text message, that is how we communicate so we found that more than an email or more than a phone call, a text. And it’s a dedicated text line that I have that I… several times a week I spend time just responding to people and connecting with them over, over text message. Rich — Hmm, very cool. I Love that – that’s, that’s fantastic. What a helpful conversation this has been; I’ve, I’ve really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for taking time. When you think about kind of up over the horizon, you think okay like we’re you know, 2 years from now we’re so we’re on the eighth wave or the twelfth wave or whatever… Julie — Yeah. Rich — …and we’re you know, continuing to process through, ah Covid, what do you think, you know, where is, where does your mind go on kind of future things at Chapel Hill when you think about where are there things down the road you’re thinking about testing or working on to help people get connected in groups, or to get plugged into more service opportunities. Are there, you know, questions you’re even asking ah, you know in the future? Where’s your, where’s your mind going when you think about that kind of thing? Julie — Yeah, the two big things that I am thinking about in the new year – my kind of New Year’s resolution projects are… Rich – Yep. Julie — …the first is that I am, I’ve been really thinking about volunteer engagement before Covid and then we’ve seen it progress even more during Covid. We had a deficit of volunteers and I know that we are not the only church that’s experienced that… Rich — Okay. Yep. Julie — …I know that there are quite a few, or that that’s the norm now is that people aren’t jumping to serve. And so I’ve really been thinking through. How do we engage volunteers? How do we shepherd them well? How do we retain them? How do we, how do we begin even in that recruit, ah stage? So that’s something that I’m thinking about and ah, really working hard to build a structure and framework that is um, that’s good for volunteer engagement. Rich — Mmm-hmm. Julie — And and then the second thing that I’m thinking about – which I feel like all of these things kind of walk hand-in-hand – is congregational care. Rich — Hmm. Julie — It has been a long hard season for a lot of people and people feel disconnected, people feel weary, and I recognize that um, in large churches it can be hard to know where to come to receive that care that they need. So ah, that’s one of my projects that I’ll be working on in this new year is thinking of what does a system of congregational care look like in a large church so that people feel well cared for. Rich — Yeah, that’s great and, and there’s the question like I’ve found in that – and I’d love to get your thoughts on this – there’s the, the people who kind of follow the system that get in a group, that get plugged in, that like have a natural kind of um – whether they’re more outgoing or they’re just, they’re, they just are, they’re joiners; they love to plug into stuff – ah, however, then then there’s the folks that are fall outside of that that just for whatever reason aren’t in a group but they still have issues that we want to care for. They’re still the kind of person we want to, you know, find, you know, to care for them. So any thoughts on how we, we kind of, early thinking on how you think you might help get those people connected and plugged in and care for them, because that’s always an interesting group. Julie — Yeah, yeah, well obviously ah, our ultimate goal is to engage people in our discipleship process. At the same time we recognize that not everybody fits into that box. And we also recognize that, I don’t think that discipleship is formulaic necessarily… Rich — Right. Julie — …so there are people that are growing in other arenas. We were just talking about, ah in our leadership team, a group that they’re already doing all of our discipleship process. They’re just not doing it at our church, outside of worshiping at our church. And so how do we engage them in worshiping, serving, connecting, and reaching others with the gospel when they’re already doing it so well. Rich — Mmm-hmm. Julie — …So yeah that it is a big question to wrestle through. And I think that um, it’s really finding out that one touch point and how to engage them in that that one touch point. And so if they’re here in one of those four environments engaging them there and then inviting them into further relationship. Rich — Love it. Julie — So that’s that’s kind of what I’m thinking through, but I do think that it is that constant the person who is a ambivalent attender. Maybe not even a regular attender, and then all of a sudden they’re, they’re desperate for care and it’s like, we don’t really know you and so how do we… but I want, we want to care for you. Rich — Yes. Julie — So learning how to to do that and is something that will be a big hurdle and I’m excited to tackle it but I don’t quite know the answer yet. Rich — Yeah, that’s cool. Well this has been fantastic. What a great conversation. Is there anything else you want to share just as we wrap up today’s episode? Julie — Um, yeah I always have more that I could say – I love to talk. Rich — Yeah, that’s great. That’s why we have you on! So I think that one of the things, as I’ve been thinking through this congregational care piece, is I’ve also been thinking through, ah, caring for church leadership as well. Rich — Hmmm. Julie — And I am just convinced that healthy churches are led by healthy leaders… Rich — So true. Julie — …and that the greatest thing that we can do as church leaders, to lead healthy churches, is is be just as concerned about our own health. We need to be paying attention to our spiritual health, our mental health, our physical health, and… and so I think that even within this thinking through congregational care, I’m thinking: how do I care, how do how do we care for our team? How do we care for our pastors? How do we care for our staff? Rich — Mmm-hmm. Julie — So um I just, I think that for all of the ministry leaders out there that are thinking, how do I uphold and shepherd this flock that the Lord has entrusted into my care? So much of of that is actually caring for us as shepherds as well. I’m thinking, how am I caring for myself too? Rich — So true. So true. Pastor Julie, I really appreciate you being here today. Super helpful. Where do we want to send people online if they want to track with you or with the church? Where do we want to send them so they can kind of follow the Chapel Hill story a little bit? Julie — Yeah, yeah, chapelhillpc.org is our website. You can check us out there and also if you look up Chapel Hill Church on Youtube you can find us there. Rich — Great. Good. Thank you so much – appreciate you being here today. Julie — Thank you.

Welcome back to the unSeminary podcast. We’re talking with Kadi Cole, the founder of Kadi Cole & Company, an organization created to help leaders of all organizations. Kadi is with us today to talk about encouraging female leaders at your church while removing barriers from leadership opportunities. Find the drop off. // Many men in church leadership are trying to help the women on their teams develop their potential, but they find that opportunities aren’t being taken advantage of by women, or enjoyed by women who are there. We may unknowingly put up barriers to women thriving in leadership and do a disservice to what we’re trying to accomplish in creating opportunities for them. If you find this is the case, look at where women are entering the pipeline in your church’s staff and volunteers, and where they’re dropping off. In most churches there is a big drop-off in women moving from the lower level leadership roles to manager roles. If you see that drop-off then you know there is something in your culture preventing women from finding their place and feeling confident.Ask about experiences in those roles. // If you have women with great potential stepping down or stepping back from leadership, ask them what their experience was in the organization. We may hear a variety of answers from the work not being worth their time, to lack of feedback to help with growth. But sometimes we simply have things in our culture that make meeting easier for men and not women based on needs for their daily family and home lives.Acknowledge the awkwardness. // When you’re thinking about how to talk to women about their roles and what is holding them back, it will be an awkward conversation on both sides. Just acknowledge that it might be weird and uncomfortable to talk about these topics. Let her know that you care deeply about her and her being everything she can be in the kingdom. Communicate that you want to talk about what needs fixing in your leadership that will help open doors for her to lead successfully. Make space for that confidential, honest and authentic conversation to happen.Ask open-ended questions about life. // It’s easy to make assumptions about women or their life stage, so be individually focused by asking them open-ended questions about their actual lives. Communicating assumptions without knowing the truth sends mixed messages about a female leader’s value and importance as a leader. Valuing a female leader and her contribution means making space for her voice.Give advice, not just compliments. // Giving vague compliments on a job well done isn’t constructive. Women rely more on constructive feedback. Offer specific compliments, but also add in suggestions on what to do next time. This affirms and develops her leadership while also encouraging her that she’s still wanted on the team. Help clean the sticky floor. // When a woman comes into a male-dominated organization, it’s not easy to navigate and can bring out insecurity. Each woman has a “sticky floor” that is made of doubts and conversations women have in their own minds that keep them stuck. It causes them to hold themselves back from moving forward and going for leadership opportunities. You can help them fight the sticky floor by letting them know how they are demonstrating leadership. In addition to their confidence, also help them increase their competence by developing specific leadership skills that prepare them for higher levels of management.Increase leadership confidence. // Women often tend to hold themselves to higher standards in their work and compare themselves to others. In Kadi’s latest book, Find Your Leadership Voice in 90 Days, she hopes to give women step-by-step guidance on how to step into leadership roles with confidence without compromising who they are. You can learn more about Kadi and her work at kadicole.com. Learn more about the new book at findyourleadershipvoice.me. 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: Red Letter Challenge One of the best times of the year to start an all-in church series is the time after Easter. The team at Red Letter Challenge have become the 40-day church series experts…they created not only a 40-day church series, but offer unique daily challenges as well for everyone in your church to complete. It’s a fun, amazing time and many people take steps towards Jesus! Pastors, grab your free 40-day challenge book here and see what your church can do!

Thanks for joining in for this week’s unSeminary podcast. Today we’re talking with Brian Cook, the lead pastor of ACF Church  (Alliance Christian Fellowship) in Eagle River, Alaska. Right now 4.5 million people in the US are quitting their job every month and 50% are looking for a new job. Staff culture is a big deal and it’s important to enjoy yourself at work. Listen in as Brian talks with us about shifting your team culture so that your staff and volunteers will love what they do. Do you enjoy the current culture at your church? // A short time after coming to work for ACF Church Brian realized that he didn’t really enjoy the culture there, but also that he was responsible for setting it. If you find yourself in a similar place, ask yourself what you and your team have done to create your current culture. Ask your staff what it’s like to serve at the church. Encourage your team to be honest and share their thoughts and experiences.Set up the structure to grow. // Part of the problem at ACF Church was that they didn’t have the structure for their growth. When the church grows the team should grow, but also a structure for moving from a smaller size to a larger one is necessary. At ACF people felt like they were cogs in a wheel that could be replaced rather than part of a team that was being discipled and building relationships. Instead of trying to use people to build the ministry, ACF wanted to shift to using the ministry to build people. They set up a discipleship structure with a director/coach/team captain and flow charts so each person knew who they were caring for and who was caring for them.Check in with others. // ACF Church determined that the right number of people for someone to lead is six individuals. This small number gives leaders the time to check in consistently with their people. A higher number made it difficult to keep up with the check ins, and less than six wasn’t meeting the needs of the teams and church.Know what to look for. // There are things the leadership looks for in their team members to identify those who could move into a leading or coaching role. This includes looking for those who are setting the culture in their area by investing in their colleagues and praying for them without being asked. They might arrive early or stay late for meetings or events, and have trust and rapport with others.Create changes needed in leadership. // As the church grew, Brian found himself overwhelmed with doing all the leading at the top by himself. He realized he was trying to excel at things he wasn’t built for, so he divided his work into three jobs and brought in two people to work on the leadership team with him. In addition to the lead pastor role, this now includes the executive pastor and director of operations. Each of the three jobs has their own focus. As lead pastor, Brian’s focus is on the vision. The director of operations focuses on how to “make it work”. The executive pastor role is to “keep it moving”.COVER is needed to love your role. // Brian is giving us a digital copy of Leading At ACF Church: Being a Coach. He wrote this to help him define someone who loves what they do at the church. He created the acronym COVER, which stands for Care, Oversight, Vision, Encouragement, and Resources. These are the things people need in order to love their jobs. The staff has weekly COVER meetings with every team member which last 20-30 minutes. During this time they focus on those letters and whatever the immediate need is. Oversight, for example, helps people understand what is expected of them and what success looks like. Encouragement reminds people of the big why behind everything ACF Church does by telling stories of how God is at work. You can learn more about ACF Church at www.acfak.org or you can find Brian at AKBrian on social media. Click here to download a copy of Leading at ACF Church: Being a Coach. 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: Medi-Share Medi-Share is an innovative health care solution for Christians looking to save money without sacrificing on quality. As the nation’s largest health care sharing community, Medi-Share members take comfort in knowing their eligible medical expenses will be shared by their community. Click here to download the FREE REPORT: The 10 Things About Mental Health Every Pastor (& Leader) MUST Know!