Revitalize My Church

Gen Z, and young men in particular, are showing renewed spiritual interest, and small churches are well positioned to respond.

Young adults aren’t looking for a big show. They want to be known, mentored, and given room to ask real questions.

A smaller church can win with a Sunday experience that is thoughtful, intentional, and relational.

Don’t wait for young adults to walk in. Get outside your walls, start with the grandkids and kids of your own members, and follow through on what you offer.

The research says yes, though it’s still early. Bart opens the episode with several trends worth paying attention to:

Gen Z attending religious services at least monthly rose from 29% in 2022 to 40% in 2024. Becket Fund, via The Blaze

Gen Z is still the least religious generation on record: 34% unaffiliated, compared to 29% of Millennials and 25% of Gen X. The Blaze

Men are now outpacing women in weekly church attendance, 46% to 40%. StreamingChurch.tv

Over 70% of Gen Z check out a church online before ever visiting in person. StreamingChurch.tv

Bible sales are up 41.6% since 2022. Carey Nieuwhof

Nathan believes the numbers. He sees the Spirit of God drawing young people, especially young men, in a way we haven’t seen in years. The real question is how churches will respond to the opportunity.

For many revitalization churches, the average age is 55 and up and there isn’t a young adult in the room. Nathan says the issue usually isn’t a lack of interest from young people. It’s that the “road signs” to your church aren’t connecting with them. Those road signs include the sign out front, your website, your Google Business Profile, your social media, and the relationships your people have in the community.

Bart adds that churches need to understand how young adults search. Many are skipping Google and going straight to AI tools like ChatGPT. Digital discovery almost always comes before a personal connection.

Bart shares the story of a church that went through a rebrand but filtered every choice through its own tastes rather than the community it was trying to reach. The result still felt too old for a younger audience. The lesson: evaluate your look and messaging through the eyes of the people you want to reach, not the people already there.

Nathan is clear that this isn’t about being flashy. Young adults want a church that looks current and competent, but what really draws them is a place where they can get their questions answered, feel safe, and connect with people who will invest in them.

Nathan sees a level of intellectual curiosity among young men that he hasn’t seen before. They want to learn, grow, and understand their faith. They also want older, mature believers to invest in them. Many grew up without a dad in the home or spent more time in front of screens than with real people, and they are hungry for something real.

Bart’s son had this experience firsthand. He visited a large church and left feeling like no one noticed he was there. A smaller church may not have the band or the crowd, but it can offer the one thing he was looking for: people who know his name.

Yes, because it isn’t the same competition. Young adults who want a big production will find it. Many others aren’t interested in that at all. Nathan notes that a lot of young adults are moving away from big, performance-style worship toward something more participatory, reflective, and authentic. For a smaller church, that authenticity is gold.

Bart boils it down to three things a small church can do well on Sunday:

Thoughtful. The experience engages their mind and emotions and challenges them.

Intentional. It’s clear there is a plan and you aren’t winging it.

Relational. There are clear next steps for building real relationships.

Bart also describes the tension he’s seeing at Bear Creek Community Church, where some young men show up faithfully to a midweek missional community (a meal, Scripture, prayer, and serving together) but have little interest in Sunday mornings.

Nathan’s practical advice: designate someone in your church who wants to invest in young men and is ready when one walks in. That person introduces themselves, learns their name, and has a plan for what comes next. Don’t overwhelm them, but let them know you want them there and have a path for them to grow. Once a mentoring relationship begins, there is a good chance they will stay.

Bart and Nathan close with practical next steps:

Don’t wait for them to walk in. Find natural places outside your building to engage young adults. Bart highlights a church that set up a booth on a local college’s back-to-school day and connected with a young man who now attends and has brought friends.

Ask the young adults you already have. Sit down with them and ask what makes them feel welcome and what you need to change.

Start with your own families. Most older congregations have kids and grandkids in this age group. Take them to lunch, play golf, or spend time with them outside the church.

Follow through. Young adults are sensitive to broken promises. If you offer something, do it.

As a friend of the hosts likes to say, if your church is all 50, 60, and 70-somethings, the future of your church isn’t in the building yet. You’ll have to go get it.

Episode 37: Five Common Reasons Church Revitalization Efforts Fail

Episode 49: Does Your Church Website Help or Hurt Your Revitalization?

The Revitalize My Church Podcast helps pastors and leaders of smaller, struggling churches navigate change and move toward a healthy, fruitful future. New episodes release on the 1st and 15th of every month. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and if you’re watching on YouTube, subscribe and ring the bell so you never miss an episode.

Dale Sellers returns as the first repeat guest in the show's history to announce that 95 Network is becoming The Renewed Pastor.

Most pastors Dale has met across four decades of ministry are discouraged, and seminary training rarely prepares them for the part of the job that actually wears them down: leading people.

Fewer than ten percent of pastors in Dale's conference rooms have ever raised a hand to say they take a real day off every week.

The two issues surfacing most in pastors right now are the refusal to Sabbath and confusion about identity and calling.

When a pastor's gifting does not match what the church needs in its current season, the natural default is to hide the gap, and hiding is exhausting.

Many moral failures are less about wanting to blow up a life and more about a leader desperate to get off the merry go round.

The Renewed Pastor Pathway is a year long, one on one coaching track built around soul care, identity and context, vision and clarity, and leadership development with a succession plan.

The goal is a thousand healthy pastors over the next ten years, with scholarships available for those who cannot cover the cost.

If you are leading a church that needs to be revitalized, you have probably built a list of things that need to change. The building. The website. The systems. The volunteer pipeline. Somewhere on that list, usually last, is you.

In this episode Bart Blair sits down with Dale Sellers, who has spent his ministry life serving small and midsize churches and who has now decided to spend the next decade of it on one thing: helping pastors get healthy. Dale is the first repeat guest in the history of the Revitalize My Church podcast, and he came back to share both the story behind his own collapse and the reason his ministry is changing its name.

You will hear why Dale thinks the training pipeline sets pastors up to be blindsided. You will hear the moment a board member put a hand in his face and told him to stop talking about his struggles. You will hear what he sees when a pastor is not as healthy as they think they are, and what he is building to help. If you have been running on empty and telling yourself the church needs you too much for you to stop, this conversation is for you.

Dale and his wife Regina spent the first decade of their marriage traveling with music groups, playing somewhere in the neighborhood of eleven hundred concerts in churches across more than thirty states. He was in his twenties, full of energy, and could not understand what he kept seeing.

Almost every pastor he met was discouraged. Church after church, state after state, the same weariness in the room.

He did not understand it until he took a local church role. Within two weeks, he says, he figured it out.

The road is not the same as the pew. As he puts it, when you travel you blow in, you blow up, and you blow out. Ministry in one place with the same people week after week is a different job entirely.

The training gap is real. Pastors are taught to preach, to handle Greek and Hebrew, to work through hermeneutics. Very few are taught how to lead people.

That gap eventually caught up with Dale personally. He pastored a church that went from thirty to three hundred and then back down to one hundred fifty after a split in year eight. The stress of it landed him in quadruple bypass surgery at fifty three, which his surgeon attributed to stress rather than family history.

"The church is the only hope for the world. There is no plan B. So we have got to help pastors be healthy to get the church healthy."

95 Network was founded in 2014 by Jim Powell, a pastor in Peoria, Illinois with a passion for the small and midsize church. Dale joined the board, then took over leadership in 2017, and became executive director in July of 2018.

The name came from church size statistics at the time.

The original math. Roughly ninety five percent of American churches were under five hundred, eighty seven percent were under two hundred, and seventy five percent were under one hundred.

The problem with naming a ministry after a percentage. The numbers move. The figure most cited now is that ninety two percent of American churches are under two hundred.

The bigger problem. If you have to explain your name every time you meet someone, and people keep hearing it as "nine to five," the name is working against you.

Over the years the ministry produced leadership resources, ran conferences, developed a one day planning intensive called Vision Day, and published a podcast with hundreds of episodes, all aimed at the churches that are the most numerous and the least resourced.

When Bart asks Dale what he looks for in a pastor who is less healthy than they think, Dale does not hesitate.

They will not Sabbath. They preach it, they teach it, they believe it, and they do not practice it.

The show of hands never breaks ten percent. In conference after conference, Dale asked who takes a literal day off every week. It has never been ten percent of the room.

It reveals what you believe about your own importance. If everything falls apart when you step away for a day, you have either built something unhealthy or you believe the church depends on you more than it does.

Silence is uncomfortable for a reason. Dale suggests some pastors stay busy precisely because quiet is where God gets a chance to correct them.

The phone made it worse. Evenings and weekends are now interruptible in a way they were not twenty years ago, and voicemail exists for a reason.

AI is the next version of the same trap. Used well it creates margin. Dale's concern, raised in a conversation with Ed Stetzer, is that pastors will simply fill the margin with more work.

"If you are listening right now and you do not Sabbath, you are already in trouble."

Dale tells a story from his own pastorate that explains a generation of silence. He asked a board member, a friend he hunted and fished with, out to lunch. He wanted to talk about what was happening inside him. No moral failure. No hidden sin. No plan to leave. Just honesty.

The man put his hand up in Dale's face and told him to stop.

"My life is a disaster and I need your life to be perfect. So I really do not want to know."

The message landed. Dale concluded he was not supposed to talk to anybody.

Groups did not help. Every fellowship he joined asked him to lead it. He had come for help, not another platform.

The pandemic cracked the door. For the first time, Dale says, pastors began admitting out loud that they were not doing well on the inside.

More are getting real help now. Counseling, marriage work, and honest conversation are more common than they were, though there is a long way to go.

Bart shares his own version of this from about fifteen years ago as a worship pastor at a growing church near Toronto. Things looked good on the outside. On the inside he had started fantasizing, every time he and his wife traveled, about never going home. He did not recognize it as depression at the time.

The second issue Dale sees rising fast is identity and calling. Recent Barna research shows pastors feeling somewhat better about themselves overall, and at the same time genuinely unsure about who God made them to be and how that fits the church they are actually serving.

The starter who cannot shepherd. Bart planted and led a church from zero to one hundred thirty five. When the church needed a stronger shepherd, his apostolic, gathering gifts stopped being what the moment required, and growth stalled.

The shepherd who cannot scale. Dale describes the mirror image: high compassion, high mercy pastors who get a church to sixty or eighty people and then cannot get past one hundred because they are buried in personal care.

Financial pressure makes it worse. Many of these churches need to cross the hundred mark just to remain viable, which turns a gifting gap into a survival question.

Hiding is the default response. When the church expects something you are not gifted to deliver, the instinct is to mask it, cover it, and create distraction. Dale says the exhaustion of that cover up is its own slow destruction.

The answer is a team, not a better pastor. No single leader carries every gift the church needs. Revitalization requires a multiplicity of gifts around the pastor.

Dale wrote Stalled out of his own story. From the outside his ministry looked full. Inside, he had concluded he was a disappointment to Jesus because he had never built a megachurch.

He did what the experts said. He applied what he learned from Bill Hybels, John Maxwell, and the Fuller Institute, and it did not produce what he had been told it would.

So he assumed he was the problem. He kept that conclusion to himself for years.

One conversation changed the trajectory. In 2014 he confessed the feeling to Tony Morgan, who asked him to write it up. The article, on thinking he would be further along by now, drew responses from pastors all over the country saying it described them exactly.

The measurement itself is borrowed. Dale argues that today's church still lives in the residue of the seeker and attractional movements, which taught a generation to measure success in numbers and budgets.

"When you compare yourself to everybody else, that is a bad treadmill to get on. It never stops."

Bart adds a distinction worth keeping. A megachurch pastor and a normal size church pastor share a title and almost nothing else. It is the difference between an academic with a PhD and a neurosurgeon. Both are called doctor. They got there differently and they do different work.

About a year and a half ago Dale sensed a clear shift. 95 Network had been running what he calls a shotgun approach, trying to help everyone, and too many of the people they reached were hunting for a silver bullet rather than doing the work. The new direction is narrower and deeper: help the pastors who actually want to be helped.

Effective September 1, 95 Network becomes The Renewed Pastor. The coaching track is called The Renewed Pastor Pathway.

Quarter one, soul care. Getting healthy internally, including the friendship deficit most pastors carry.

Quarter two, identity and context. A deep dive into what you were called to and how that fits the ministry you are actually in.

Quarter three, vision and clarity. Including how to adapt principles from larger church leaders into your own context rather than importing them wholesale.

Quarter four, leadership development and succession. Identifying who you hand things off to, and helping the church accept that a succession plan is normal and necessary.

Bart pushes for specifics, and Dale lays out the format.

Monthly one hour Zoom calls with your coach. One on one by default, with cohort options possible for groups who prefer that.

Physical materials. A printed booklet for each phase, plus online components.

An onsite visit. Somewhere around months seven through nine, a coach comes to you, meets your leaders, and helps the church assess where it is and where it is going.

Open to more than lead pastors. Staff members and volunteer leaders are welcome, including children's ministry leaders, with coaches available for both men and women.

There is a cost, and there is help. Dale is direct that people who have no skin in the game do not follow through. Underwriting is already in place to fund scholarships for pastors who cannot cover the full cost.

Every coach has scar tissue. Dale's criteria: they have seen the ugly side of ministry, been through the hard seasons, and in many cases paid a physical price for not caring for themselves.

Coaching begins rolling out this fall, with ten coaches lined up across the country and more joining.

Near the end, Bart names something he had been discussing with a group of pastors that same week. God's pleasure in you is not tied to your production for him. If the goals never get met, if the church never reaches the number you hoped for, God is not disappointed in you.

"Jesus is not keeping score."

Dale's closing hope for the pastors listening is not a bigger church. It is a marriage still intact, a family still connected, real friends, and a whole life outside the church bubble. Too many pastors, he says, live entirely inside that bubble, and it is not healthy.

When was the last time you took a full, literal day off? Not a slow day. A real one.

If you are not taking one, what do you believe would happen to your church if you did?

Where is the gap between how God has gifted you and what your church currently expects from you?

Are you spending energy hiding that gap? What is that costing you?

Who in your life knows how you are actually doing on the inside, and when did you last tell them the truth?

Whose ministry are you comparing yours to, and what would change if you stopped?

The Renewed Pastor, formerly 95 Network, at TheRenewedPastor.org

The Renewed Pastor Pathway, the year long coaching track

Stalled, Dale Sellers' book on ministry disappointment and recovery, available on Amazon

The Five Big Rocks of Church Revitalization, by Bart Blair &. Nathan Bryant

New episodes release on the 1st and 15th of every month. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and visit revitalizemy.church for more resources to help your church find its path toward renewal.

Evangelism is not either personal or corporate. It is both, and a church that neglects either one will stall out.

The Great Commission was given to the disciples collectively, not to individuals in isolation. God's strategy for reaching lost people is his church.

When 94% of pastors do not feel effective at sharing the gospel outside the pulpit, a shared church strategy removes pressure rather than adding it.

Every believer should be able to articulate their own testimony in two minutes and clearly explain the gospel. Training for that is not optional.

Find the person in your church who is evangelistically gifted, empower them, and build your process around the gifts God has already placed in your body.

Bart opens this episode by talking about the weather, on purpose, so he can ask you a better question: have you taken the temperature of your church's evangelism and outreach lately?

If you lead a church that is plateaued or declining, this is one of the hardest conversations to have honestly. You know the vast majority of your people are not regularly sharing their faith. You may not be either. And the temptation is to swing hard toward one solution, either a heavy program of outreach events or a push to train every individual member to become a personal evangelist.

Nathan Bryant and Bart Blair make the case in this episode that the swing itself is the problem. This is a both/and conversation, and churches that only pick one side of it end up frustrated.

"I don't think you can have an effective corporate evangelistic engagement without personal evangelistic engagement happening, because it's actually the combination of the both." Nathan Bryant

Nathan makes a point in this episode that reframes the whole conversation. When Western Christians hear "go and make disciples," we hear it as a personal command directed at us as individuals. That reading is not wrong, but it is incomplete.

Jesus gathered them first. He called his disciples together and commissioned them collectively, to go and make disciples together.

No individual has every gift. A single believer was never meant to carry a lost person through the entire journey from first contact to mature discipleship.

The church is the strategy. God's plan for reaching the lost is the collection of people and the varied gifts he has distributed among them.

Bart reads from 1 Corinthians 3 in the episode, where Paul describes himself as planting and Apollos as watering while God gives the growth. The passage is not just about unity. It is about the division of labor in kingdom work.

Bart went looking for a clean statistic on how many born-again believers in North America regularly share their faith with someone who is not yet following Jesus. He came back without one. The reports vary too widely to give a clear number.

What the reports agree on is the direction: far fewer believers are sharing their faith than are not. And you can verify that in your own congregation, whether you have 20 people or 2,000.

One number did stand out. A Barna report referenced in the episode found that only 6% of pastors surveyed felt they themselves were effective at sharing the gospel with non-believers. That means 94% of pastors carry a quiet lack of confidence in their ability to lead someone to Christ outside of a Sunday sermon.

That number matters for a specific reason. Most churches do not have enough non-believers in the room on a Sunday morning for pulpit evangelism to move the needle. If the pastor is only confident in the one context where lost people are least present, the church has a problem no amount of preaching will solve.

Here is the reframe that makes this episode worth sharing with your leadership team: a corporate evangelism strategy does not add another burden to the pastor's plate. It takes weight off.

If you are one of the 94%, the answer is not to white-knuckle your way into becoming someone you are not. The answer is to look around your congregation and identify who God has already gifted for this.

Do the inventory. Run spiritual gift assessments so you actually know who in your church is evangelistically wired.

Empower, then get out of the way. Work through that person to facilitate what happens in the area where you are not strong.

Stop being the bottleneck. Bart shares that as a lead pastor he was leading every evangelistic study himself, and he simply did not have the time for the follow-up those relationships required.

"Find someone in your church who has the gift, empower that person, and then work through that person to facilitate how stuff is taking place in this area of not where you're strong, but where they are." Nathan Bryant

Bart raises this in a conversation he had with a pastor days before recording. One of the deepest problems in established North American churches is that we lose sight of how lost we ourselves were before we were saved.

That forgetting has consequences. We stop preaching and teaching it. We lose the sense of urgency. The lost sheep in our community, our neighborhood, our workplace, and our own family stop registering as genuinely lost.

Nathan adds a second layer to this. The cultural context has shifted underneath us:

Most people today have no church background. Their parents did not attend either.

Their education has largely been formed against belief in God. They may have heard of Jesus, but the framework is missing.

They have a great deal to understand before they can make an informed decision. A five or ten minute gospel presentation assumes a foundation many people simply do not have.

This does not mean you stop sharing the gospel when the Holy Spirit prompts you. It means you plan for a process rather than assuming a moment.

Nathan lays out the practical shape of it in this episode. If you are wondering where to start building a coordinated plan, this is the framework:

Keep the conversation constant. Evangelism is talked about regularly, and the gospel is preached regularly from the pulpit.

Get clarity at the leadership level. How are we connecting with lost people? How are we connecting them to our people? How are we building trust? How are we generating spiritual interest?

Define where the gospel gets communicated. Name the specific place in your process where a person hears the gospel clearly and is invited to respond.

Think in process, not events. People move through stages: connection, trust, spiritual openness, gospel clarity, decision, discipleship.

Communicate the whole thing to your people. Your congregation should be able to answer the question, "What is the path to a lost person coming to know Jesus in our church?"

The philosophy and strategy will look different from church to church, and Nathan is explicit that he is not prescribing one model. What matters is that you have one, that it is clear, and that your people know what it is.

Plenty of declining churches equate evangelism with events. A fall festival, a community breakfast, a Christmas outreach. Bart's assessment is direct: an event can be part of an overarching strategy, but events by themselves are not going to move the needle nearly as much as churches think they will.

The purpose of an outreach event is not conversion. It is to start new relationships, build trust, and invite people into community. That only works if your people are already in relationship with lost people and have someone to bring.

"If the people in the church are not actively engaged to make relationships with lost people and are in the lives of lost people, I don't care what you're doing corporately, you're not going to get any traction." Nathan Bryant

Both Bart and Nathan use an evangelistic Bible study as the anchor point in their strategy, and this section of the episode gets specific about why it works.

It lowers the bar for your average member. If someone is not comfortable walking a friend through the Romans Road on a napkin, they can still invest in that relationship and invite that friend into the next study cycle, then sit beside them through it.

It puts the right gift in the right seat. The teaching is handled by someone with evangelistic gifting rather than by whoever happens to be available.

It multiplies. Bart and Nathan have both watched people come to Christ through a Gospel of John study and then begin using that same study to reach their own friends, in their neighborhoods and homes.

Everyone knows where the path leads. When a member has a friend who is far from God, they know exactly what the next step is.

Nathan pushes back gently on Bart's description of this as a safety net. It is more than that. It is the right distribution of gifts. If you have a gifted evangelistic teacher, why would you not want that person in the room at the moment of decision?

He backs it with numbers from his own experience planting Grace Community Church. He was running three evangelistic studies a week and could not add another, so he trained others to lead them. The results varied meaningfully by leader: one man saw roughly 80% of participants who completed the homework make a decision for Christ, a couple saw around 70%, and another leader saw about 40%. If you get one opportunity with a family exploring Jesus, you want the person with the strongest gift in that room.

This is the most useful story in the episode for any pastor who is holding onto something too tightly.

In his last church, Bart handed the evangelistic study to a retired couple he had identified as evangelistically wired. He knew going in that they would not teach the material as well as he could. Teaching was not their gifting.

The success rate went up anyway.

They had time. This became their primary ministry. It had never been his only ministry.

They followed up. When someone missed a week or had lingering questions, they had the energy to nurture that relationship.

They had the gift. Personality and calling combined into something Bart could not replicate.

More than once, Bart's phone rang at 7:30 or 8:00 in the evening: someone had just committed their life to Jesus, the hot tub was warming up, call everyone, we are baptizing them tonight. Twenty or thirty people would gather in that backyard for a same-night baptism.

The point Bart lands on deserves a second look. The primary focus of an evangelistic study is not Bible teaching. It is not parsing Greek verbs or establishing the historicity of the text. It is helping people get to know the person of Jesus. And people tend to get to know Jesus by spending time with someone who looks and acts like him.

Bart is emphatic that the corporate emphasis in this episode does not let individuals off the hook. Two things every person in your church should be able to do:

Tell their own story in two minutes or less. What life looked like before Jesus, how they met him, what they learned, how they responded, and how it changed things. The Apostle Paul's pattern.

Explain the gospel clearly. That sin separated us from God, that Jesus died to pay that penalty, and that those who believe and receive him are given the right to be called children of God, adopted into his family and indwelled by the Holy Spirit.

If your church has no intentional training toward those two competencies, Bart's assessment is that you are doing your church family a disservice. We consistently overestimate both what our people know and their ability to put it into words.

The caution is what comes next. Do not build that training on the assumption that everyone will then leave the building and start sharing their faith at Starbucks and the soccer field. Some will. Most will not. Which is exactly why the corporate strategy has to exist alongside the personal training.

One more practical note from Bart, aimed at your congregation more than at you: if a church member is walking with a lost friend who has spiritual questions they cannot answer, they should bring that friend to the pastor's office.

It will make your pastor's day. He will keep his office open all afternoon for it.

"I don't think the issue is that we've got too many people asking too many questions and we don't know how to handle them. I think the issue is we're not actually connected with lost people on the individual and personal level." Bart Blair

If someone in our congregation asked, "What is the path to a lost person coming to know Jesus in our church?" could they answer it? Could we?

Who in our church is evangelistically gifted, and are we currently deploying that person in a way that uses that gift?

Are our outreach events connected to a larger process, or are they standing alone and hoping something happens?

When was the last time we trained our people to share their own testimony clearly and briefly?

Am I, as the leader, functioning as a bottleneck in any part of our evangelistic process?

Know a pastor who feels the weight of evangelism resting entirely on their own shoulders? Send them this episode. The conversation Bart and Nathan have here may be the reframe that changes how they lead their church into outreach.

If you have questions, want coaching, or would like access to the evangelistic Bible study resources mentioned in this episode, reach out. Fill out the form at revitalizemy.church or email Bart directly at [email protected].

If you have not yet subscribed, do that wherever you listen to podcasts so you do not miss future episodes. New episodes release on the 1st and 15th of every month.Subscribe to Revitalize My Church

New episodes release on the 1st and 15th of every month. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and visit revitalizemy.church for more resources to help your church find its path toward renewal.

Shawn Kennedy planted a church in San Diego that grew for fifteen years, then felt called back to replant the very church that first shared the gospel with him.

That church, Church at the Shores in Gulf Shores, Alabama, was three to six months from closing when Shawn arrived. Eight years later it is thriving.

Shawn unpacks what it actually took to turn the church around, including culture, finances, leadership structure, and a renewed sense of joy.

He also explains how the Fresh Start Network partners healthy churches with struggling ones to help them find new life.

Shawn shares an early look at his upcoming book on spiritual formation, inspired by a conversation with a vineyard's vine dresser in Tuscany.

If you lead a church that feels like it is running out of time, this episode is for you. You will hear from Shawn Kennedy, who has walked both sides of church revitalization. He led a healthy, growing church for fifteen years, then felt God calling him back to replant the struggling church that led him to faith in the first place. You will hear what he found when he arrived, what it took to turn the culture around, and how his work with the Fresh Start Network is helping other churches walk the same road.

Shawn was told the church had three to six months left before it would close its doors. He found a congregation of about thirty five people who were discouraged but still open to what God might do. The building was aging, finances were tight, and the previous pastor's approach had left the church with a difficult reputation in the community.

"A sick church can't laugh, and a healthy church can't stop laughing."

Shawn points to a story about Howard Schultz returning to Starbucks and immediately sensing something was wrong the moment he walked into a store. For Shawn, the shift at Church at the Shores was similar. Around eight months in, he began to notice a change in the atmosphere, a sense that the joy of the Lord had returned to the room.

The Starbucks parallel: Just as Schultz noticed a change in smell and feel before he could point to specific numbers, Shawn noticed a change in tone and laughter in the room before he could point to specific metrics.

Joy as a marker of health: Shawn describes joy, not attendance, as one of the earliest and clearest signs that a church is coming back to life.

Faces tell the story: Shawn now looks for people laughing and engaged as evidence that the culture has genuinely shifted.

Fresh Start Network was founded by Bill Malick, who helped see six thousand churches planted in the U.S. and abroad before turning his focus to churches that are struggling or dying. Shawn has served alongside Bill since the organization's early stages.

The mission in one line: Fresh Start's team often says it this way, we're not saving churches, we're rescuing missions.

The Fresh Start evaluation: A tool that helps church leaders understand where their congregation sits on the church life cycle, since every church moves through seasons.

Coaching and resources: Once a church has clarity on where it stands, Fresh Start comes alongside with relationships and practical next steps.

Partner churches: One of the most effective long term strategies Fresh Start has found is pairing healthy, life giving churches with struggling ones, either as a friendship partnership or a deeper family style partnership, to walk the replanting journey together.

Shawn spent fifteen years pastoring a church he helped plant near the University of California, San Diego campus. He never expected to leave it. When the church that first shared the gospel with him reached out and asked him to consider becoming their lead pastor, his first instinct was no. Two weeks of what he describes as disruption and disorientation followed, along with a sense that God was inviting him and his wife to take a step of faith. They moved back, and Shawn became the lead pastor of the same church whose gospel witness had shaped his own faith years earlier.

"Jesus writes the best stories."

Shawn is working on a book with InterVarsity Press centered on spiritual formation. The idea traces back to a conversation with a vine dresser at a vineyard in Tuscany, Italy, where Shawn was asked to officiate a wedding. The vine dresser told him that vineyards can produce usable grapes in three to five years, but the choice grapes used for wine take seven to ten years to mature.

Spiritual formation defined: Shawn describes it as the slow, beautiful work of God, carried out through relationships and practices over time.

A caution for pastors: He points out how easy it is to look for three to five year results when the deepest, most lasting growth often takes far longer.

Where would you say your church currently sits on the church life cycle?

What would it look like for your church to rediscover a sense of joy, not just improved attendance or programs?

Is there a healthy church nearby that could serve as a partner in your revitalization journey?

If this conversation encouraged you, share it with a pastor or church leader who needs to hear that a dying church can come back to life. You can find Shawn Kennedy and the Fresh Start Network at freshstartnetwork.com.

New episodes release on the 1st and 15th of every month. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and visit revitalizemy.church for more resources to help your church find its path toward renewal.

Key Takeaways

In this episode, Bart Blair walks through the four questions every unchurched visitor is silently asking when they land on your church website, then shifts to a growing challenge many churches haven't caught up to yet. People are increasingly finding churches through AI search tools instead of Google, and most church websites simply don't have enough content, or the right kind of content, for those tools to find and recommend them. Bart offers a practical, do it yourself exercise using Claude AI to evaluate and improve your site.

Bart opens with the question he believes matters most to an unchurched visitor: will I fit in here? He argues photos are the primary way a website answers this, and that homepages should be full of authentic images of church community life rather than stock photos or pictures of the building, the stage, or the worship team.

People will choose your church when they see the eyes of people whose lives have been changed by Christ.

The second question Bart identifies is what a visiting parent wants to know about children's ministry. He recommends plain, findable navigation and encourages churches without a full program to build one, even a small one, rather than leaving nothing prepared.

Third, Bart addresses the trust question, noting that many unchurched visitors carry wariness toward pastors given the frequency of negative church stories in the news. He recommends an easy to find staff and leadership page, with special attention to the senior pastor.

The fourth question is the most countercultural, according to Bart: the visitor wants to know what's in it for them. He encourages churches to replace vision statements, slogans, and doctrinal language on the homepage with a clear benefit statement addressed to someone who doesn't yet know Jesus.

Bart pivots to a broader trend: people are increasingly discovering churches through AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity rather than through a traditional Google search. He explains that these tools work conversationally and pull from a much wider set of sources than your website alone.

The A in AI does not stand for accurate. It's artificial intelligence, not accurate information.

Bart shares a personal example of researching his own church, Bear Creek Community Church, and discovering that some AI generated answers were pulling details from other churches with the same name because his own site lacked sufficient detail.

Bart closes with a practical, low cost exercise pastors can do themselves using Claude AI to evaluate and strengthen a website page.

For reflection

Share this episode with a pastor or ministry leader who could use a fresh look at their church's website and online presence.

Subscribe to Revitalize My Church wherever you listen, and visit revitalizemy.church for more resources on church health and revitalization.

Episode 48: Show Notes

About This Episode of the Revitalize My Church Podcast

In this episode, Bart queues up an AI overview of the new book that he co-authored with Nathan Bryant. The book is called "The Five Big Rocks of Church Revitalization."

Subscribe and Leave a Review

If this episode was helpful, the best thing you can do is subscribe to Revitalize My Church wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes drop on the first and fifteenth of each month. And if you have a moment, leave a review. It helps more pastors and church leaders find this content.

Hosts: Bart Blair (Director of Church Revitalization, Assist Church Expansion) & Nathan Bryant (Executive Director, Assist)

If you are leading a small church through plateau, decline, or revitalization, you already know there is never enough time or money to fix everything at once. So when it comes to your building, where do you actually focus? In this episode, Bart Blair sits down with Nathan Bryant, Executive Director of Assist Church Expansion, to talk through how your facility either helps or hurts your revitalization efforts, and how to make smart, low cost improvements without overspending or stepping on toes.

You will walk away with a practical lens for evaluating your own building. From the parking lot to the restrooms to your children’s ministry space, you will learn what first time guests notice, what it communicates to them, and what you can change this month without a building campaign.

Yes, but not in the way most pastors assume. Bart and Nathan are both church planters who spent years in portable, rented spaces, so they bring a unique perspective on this. Your building is a ministry tool that God has given you to steward, not the main driver of revitalization. The real change has to happen in the culture and mission of your church. But your facility either removes barriers for newcomers or creates them, which means it absolutely plays a supporting role in whether people stick around long enough to experience that culture change in the first place.

Most churches land in one of two ditches. Some pastors believe a new coat of paint or a renovated lobby will single handedly turn the church around, so they pour disproportionate energy and money into the building. Others swing the opposite direction and barely notice their facility at all, because they have grown comfortable in the space over many years. Nathan compares it to having friends over to your house. You do not notice the mess until you know guests are coming. The goal is a healthy middle: invest where it actually removes barriers for guests, and do not pretend a building project will fix a culture problem.

Decluttering is the single highest impact, lowest cost change you can make to your facility, but it requires patience and permission. Many churches have rooms full of decades old equipment, holiday decor, and furniture that nobody is using, simply because no one felt authorized to get rid of it. Nathan shares a real example of a church that cleared out a room full of decades old Christmas pageant costumes after getting buy in from longtime members, freeing up usable classroom and office space.

Research consistently shows that a first time guest starts forming an opinion about your church before the service even begins. If your building gets drive by traffic, your landscaping, signage, and exterior lighting are doing more talking than you realize. Nathan compares it to walking into a nice restaurant and getting a glimpse of a dirty kitchen. Even people who are not naturally detail oriented will pick up on a building that feels tired or uncared for, and it can quietly become a reason they do not come back.

If you are trying to reach young families, your restrooms may matter more than your sound system or your stage lighting. Bart and Nathan both point to restrooms as one of the most overlooked spaces in church facilities, and one of the most important to young moms in particular. A dated, dim, or poorly maintained restroom can undo the goodwill built by a great worship service. The fix does not have to be expensive. Fresh paint in light colors, updated fixtures, and proper ventilation go a long way toward making the space feel modern and cared for.

This is one of the more sensitive conversations in church revitalization. Decor should reflect where your church is headed, not just where it has been. That does not mean erasing your history. Nathan shares an example of a church that gave the older generation one room to decorate however they wanted, and another church that created a dedicated honor wall telling the story of the church from its founding to today. Both approaches let a congregation celebrate its past without letting that past dominate every room a new guest walks into.

Practical first steps include digitizing old missionary or anniversary photos instead of leaving them in frames on the wall, replacing outdated furniture that may have been donated from a member’s home, and inviting two or three young couples from your target demographic to walk through the building and share their honest first impressions.

Your children’s ministry space is one of the clearest signals you can send to young families, even before they have a single child enrolled. If your nursery equipment, toys, and furnishings look like they have not been touched in years, that message comes through loud and clear. One church featured in this episode prioritized a small donation toward updating one restroom and their children’s space, and saw the payoff almost immediately when new families visited and felt comfortable bringing their kids back. Clean, safe, simple, and modern beats elaborate every time. Add a visible signal on the outside of the building, like a playground, so families know at a glance that kids are welcome.

“We’re going to clean the house, we’re going to set the table, we’re going to bake the cake, and then we’re going to open the door.”

Nathan Bryant, Episode 47

If this episode gave you a fresh way to look at your facility, share it with another pastor who is thinking through the same questions.

Subscribe to the Revitalize My Church podcast for new episodes every 1st and 15th of the month, and visit revitalizemy.church for more articles, eBooks, and free assessment tools to help your church move toward a new and healthy future.

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About the Revitalize My Church Podcast: Since summer 2024, we've been helping church leaders navigate change and reorient to healthy futures. Our goal isn't to make small churches big—it's to help churches revision, revitalize, or restart find solid footing and healthy systems.

Most struggling churches assume they need the same kind of help. Terry Long says that assumption is one of the first things that has to go.

Terry serves as the Church Health and Revitalization Strategist for the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina. He joined the state convention in April 2020, holds a doctorate of ministry in church revitalization from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and has spent two decades in vocational ministry. In this conversation with host Bart Blair, Terry walks through the framework NC Baptists uses to assess struggling churches, why revitalization and reconstruction require two completely different responses, and what pastors consistently get wrong when they come asking for help.

WHAT YOU WILL HEAR IN THIS EPISODE

• Why NC Baptists developed a ten-question church assessment, and what it is actually designed to do

• The two categories struggling churches fall into: revitalization candidates and reconstruction candidates, and why treating them the same is a mistake

• What NC Baptists looks for when assessing a church: missional engagement, discipleship health, leadership development, and baptism trends

• Two real stories of NC Baptist churches that turned around, including a church of 30 senior adults that went from no pastor and no direction to 10 baptisms in a single Sunday

• Why revitalization has to start with the pastor before it can start with the church

• The statistic that stopped Terry cold early in his ministry: 92 percent of pastors have never been personally discipled

• Why the come-and-see model of church no longer works, and what has to replace it

• Why Terry believes the decline of cultural Christianity is not bad news for the church

A KEY QUOTE FROM THIS EPISODE

"I actually think this is a great thing. I know a Lord that said we're supposed to go and make disciples of all nations. I actually think this is the Lord refining his church to get back to do what we were supposed to do in the first place."

-- Terry Long

FOR THE PASTOR WHO IS LISTENING

If your church has been plateaued or declining for years and you are not sure whether you need a coach, a partner church, or something else entirely, this episode will help you figure out which kind of help actually fits your situation. Terry breaks down the difference in plain terms and gives you a framework for thinking clearly about where your church is and what it needs next.

And if you have been carrying the weight of a church that feels like it might be past the point of no return, the story of a 30-person church of senior adults who saw 10 baptisms six months into a turnaround process is worth hearing.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• NC Baptists Church Revitalization: https://ncbaptist.org/ministries/church-revitalization

• North American Mission Board Replant: https://www.namb.net/church-replanting/

• Reclaiming Glory by Mark Clifton

• Embers to a Flame by Harry Reeder

• Church revitalization resources by Tom Chaney, Orlando Baptists

ABOUT REVITALIZE MY CHURCH

Revitalize My Church is hosted by Bart Blair and Nathan Bryant. We create practical, biblically grounded content for pastors and church leaders who are navigating decline, plateau, and the hard work of leading a church toward health. New episodes release on the first and fifteenth of each month.

Subscribe so you never miss an episode, and if this conversation was helpful, share it with a pastor who needs it. That is the best thing you can do to help more church leaders find this content.

Visit us at revitalizemy.church

Are you leading a church through revitalization and running into resistance at every turn? You are not alone. Resistance is one of the most common challenges pastors face when trying to move a church from where it is to where God wants it to be. The question is not whether you will face it. The question is whether you know how to handle it well.

In Episode 45, Bart Blair and Nathan Bryant cover keys 3 through 6 of their six-key framework for handling resistance in church revitalization.

Key 3: Communicate the Vision Often and Clearly

Vision is your most powerful tool for overcoming resistance. People do not want to be managed. They want to be inspired. Cast a compelling, biblically grounded vision that answers four questions: Why are we doing this? Who are we? What are we going to do? And where are we going? Bart and Nathan talk about why vision leaks, why repetition is leadership and not redundancy, and how to use testimonies and stories of life change to reinforce the vision you are casting.

Key 4: Honor the Past While Moving Forward

Most resistance in a church revitalization is tied to something with real historical significance. People are being asked to let go of something they have valued for years, sometimes decades. Bart and Nathan share practical ways to celebrate what God has done in the church's history, allow people to grieve what is changing, and become the kind of pastor who knows the church's story well enough to carry it forward with honor. The goal is to be married to the mission without being married to the methodology.

Key 5: Know When to Push and When to Pause

Pace and timing matter as much as direction. Going too fast causes people to fall off. Going too slow kills momentum and loses your window. Bart and Nathan talk about how to identify low-hanging fruit for early wins, how to build a team that can read the room, why a well-timed pause can actually accelerate change, and why squandering momentum is just as dangerous as moving too quickly.

Key 6: Know When Resistance Has Become Conflict

Not all resistance is the same, and the way you respond to pushback needs to change when resistance turns into conflict. Bart and Nathan walk through the red flags that signal the shift, including when people stop questioning a decision and start questioning your right to make it, and when individuals begin organizing others around their opposition rather than bringing concerns directly to leadership. When that happens, you need a different set of tools.

Episode 43: Keys 1 and 2 for Handling Resistance in Church Revitalization

Episode 44: Grieving the Loss of the Church You Love, featuring author and pastor Larry Davis

Episodes 39 and 41: Six Keys to Managing Conflict in a Church Revitalization

The Revitalize My Church Podcast helps pastors of smaller, struggling churches navigate change and reorient to a new and healthy future. Hosted by Bart Blair, Director of Church Revitalization for Assist Church Expansion, and Nathan Bryant, Executive Director of Assist Church Expansion.

Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. If this episode has been helpful, leave a rating and a review, and share it with a pastor who needs it.

Visit us at RevitalizeMyChurch.com for show notes, resources, and more.

Can a dying church really come back to life? Pastor Larry Davis says yes, but not the way most revitalization books tell you.

In this episode of the Revitalize My Church Podcast, Bart Blair sits down with Larry Davis, author of "Grieving the Loss of the Church You Love" and Associational Missionary for the Eastern Baptist Association. Larry has personally led three church revitalizations and has assisted or consulted with more than 110 churches. His perspective on revitalization is unlike anything most pastors have read or heard.

Most books on church revitalization assume every church should live. Larry challenges that assumption directly. Drawing from Scripture, the Kubler-Ross stages of grief, and more than two decades of hands-on revitalization work, Larry makes the case that a congregation cannot embrace something new until it has genuinely grieved what was. That single principle changes everything about how a pastor should approach a struggling church.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS EPISODE

Why the local church has a natural life cycle, and what Scripture says about it
How the five stages of grief (denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance) show up in a declining congregation
Why trying to lead change before a church is ready almost always backfires
How Larry navigated fierce resistance at Grace Seaford Church, including angry members at Wednesday night suppers
What the "meeting before the meeting" is and why it is never optional
How cascading communication works and why skipping the middle ring is one of the costliest mistakes in revitalization
What resurrection actually looks like for a dying church, and why it is different for every congregation
How to use a simple EKG framework to honestly assess the health of your church
Why reaching out for help early dramatically increases a church's chances of genuine renewal

THE FIVE STAGES OF GRIEF IN A LOCAL CHURCH

Denial: The church refuses to admit there is a problem. Bargaining: The church tries to fix itself without actually changing. New sign letters. A younger pastor. A new program. Anger: Blame gets directed at the pastor, the leadership, or the community around the church. Depression: The congregation begins to realize the decline is real. Larry explains the important difference between secondary depression and preparatory depression. Acceptance: The congregation finally becomes open to whatever God wants to do next. This is the threshold of resurrection.

ABOUT LARRY DAVIS

Larry Davis spent nine years as an aerospace engineer before answering the call to full-time ministry in 2003. Over 26 years of vocational ministry, he has personally led three church revitalizations, co-planted Grace Mardela Church, and has assisted or consulted with more than 110 churches. He currently serves as Senior Pastor of Grace Seaford Church in Seaford, Delaware, and as Associational Missionary for the Eastern Baptist Association.

His book "Grieving the Loss of the Church You Love" is available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Website: https://www.pastorlarrydavis.com Speaking and consulting inquiries: [email protected]

BOOKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED

Grieving the Loss of the Church You Love by Larry Davis: https://www.amazon.com/Grieving-Loss-Church-You-Love/dp/1597557811
Autopsy of a Deceased Church by Thom Rainer
Transforming the Rural Church in America by Shannon O'Dell
Our Iceberg Is Melting by John Kotter
On Death and Dying by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

ABOUT REVITALIZE MY CHURCH

The Revitalize My Church Podcast is hosted by Bart Blair, Director of Church Revitalization at Assist Church Expansion. New episodes release on the 1st and 15th of every month. The podcast exists to help pastors of smaller and struggling churches navigate revitalization with practical, biblically grounded guidance.

Subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Website: https://revitalizemy.church Full show notes for this episode: