Sidecar Leader Podcast

You poured your life into them. You sat in the hospital room, performed the wedding, and prayed through the hard seasons. Then they left, and it feels personal.

In this episode, you'll learn why people leave even healthy churches, why grieving is a sign you're still a shepherd and not a weakness, and how to hold people with open hands. You'll also see how to keep from becoming bitter, suspicious, or cynical, and how to stay grateful for the ones who stay. You'll walk away with a healthier way to lead through transitions, communicate with grace, and keep your heart soft towards the people God has called you to lead.

Subscribe to Sidecar Leader and apply for the 2027 coaching cohort at sidecarleader.com/cohort. You don't have to lead alone.

You can look put together on Sunday and be coming apart the rest of the week. And the people closest to you usually feel it first.

In this conversation, Jimmy Rollins, a pastor with 30 years of ministry experience, talks honestly about leading while hurting and what happens to your team when pain goes unmanaged. We cover why you can't keep up with who you pretend to be, why every leader needs a trusted friend who can't fire them, and how to respond when a staff member brings you their own struggle. You'll also hear a challenge for senior leaders: is your push for growth costing the people closest to you?

You'll walk away with permission to stop hiding your own pain, and practical questions to ask yourself before pain spills onto others. You don't want to miss out on this one.

You've poured years into something that still isn't working, and part of you is afraid to admit it. What if the bravest move isn't pushing harder, but starting over?

In this episode, Marc Poland, Senior Pastor of Discover Church in the Philadelphia area, shares how he went from tech sales to church planting, shut down a struggling church, then rebuilt one after COVID into a thriving community. You'll hear how he knew when it was time to pivot, why he now chooses character and culture over gifting, how to let the wrong person go without delay, and how to communicate vision until your team actually lives it.

If you're a pastor, church planter, or mission-driven leader who is tired of carrying it all alone, you'll walk away with clarity and courage for your next decision.

Subscribe, and visit sidecarleader.com to learn how we help leaders get where they're called to be.

You'll spend hours mapping strategy for your team, but when was the last time you brought that same intentionality into your home? In this episode, Pastor Lee Domingue joins us to unpack the family board meeting practice that transformed how he leads his own household, complete with shared values, hard questions, and radical honesty around the table. You'll learn how vulnerability builds trust faster than achievement ever could, why "calling" and "purpose" aren't the same thing, and how pastors and business leaders can build a covenant relationship that multiplies kingdom impact. Whether you're leading a church, a company, or both, this conversation will challenge you to steward what's in your hand so you can walk fully into what's on your heart.

Ready to bring more clarity to your leadership, at work and at home? Subscribe to Sidecar Leader for more conversations like this one, and visit sidecarleader.com to learn how our coaching can help you lead with intentionality.

Stepping into a role once held by someone larger than life comes with a weight most people never see: the pressure to prove you belong, the fear of tearing down what took decades to build.

Mark Pettus, who succeeded Chris Hodges as lead pastor of Church of the Highlands, walks through what it actually took to pull off one of the smoothest leadership transitions in recent church history. You'll hear why bringing in a neutral third party was non-negotiable, how to separate the values that can never change from the preferences that can, and why "carrying" the weight of leadership is different (and more dangerous) than simply feeling it. Mark also unpacks the collaborative model reshaping how Highlands' teams work across departments. Every leader can benefit from the wisdom in this episode of navigating transitions well.

Subscribe for more conversations on clarity, culture, and strategy, and visit sidecarleader.com to see how our coaching can help your team move forward with confidence.

You've built a logo, picked your colors, and printed the merch, so why does your church's brand still feel disconnected from what people actually experience on a Sunday? That gap between how you look online and how you feel in person is more common than you think, and it's quietly costing you trust.

In this episode, we break down what a brand actually is (hint: it's so much more than a logo), walk through the four core elements every strong brand needs, and share a simple framework for identifying the primary person God has called your church to reach. You'll leave with practical tools to bring clarity to your branding decisions, from your color palette to your Sunday morning messaging, so your whole team can make decisions that are unified and trustworthy.

Ready to close the gap between your brand and your experience? Subscribe for more conversations on leading with clarity, and visit sidecarleader.com to learn how we can help you build a brand you're proud of.

Have you noticed the distance growing between you and the people you lead? It happens quietly, one busy season at a time until you're preaching from your head instead of your heart.

In this episode, Sidecar Leader sits down with Pastor Lyle Phillips of Legacy Church in East Nashville for an honest conversation about staying close to your people when ministry starts to feel like a platform. Lyle shares why "distance creates distortion," how Legacy Church protects its worship culture from a "gig mentality," and the practical rhythm he and his wife use to co-lead while keeping their marriage strong. You'll walk away with real tools for building a culture rooted in presence, not performance.

If this conversation stirred something in you, subscribe for more episodes like it, and visit sidecarleader.com to learn how we can help you lead with more clarity and health in your organization.

Ever feel like you're repeating the same values to your team over and over, wondering if any of it is actually sticking? You're not alone. Every leader eventually learns that vision leaks and culture shifts if you're not intentional about reinforcing it. In this episode, we break down the five-word framework we've used to build a lasting culture on our own team: Well, Done, Good, Faithful, Servant. You'll learn why church-wide values aren't enough on their own, how team pursuits turn vision into daily behavior, and what it actually looks like to hold your team to a shared standard of excellence, execution, character, faithfulness, and service.

You'll walk away with a practical, repeatable way to roll this out with your own team. If this gave you language for the culture you're trying to build, subscribe for more conversations on leading with clarity. And if you're ready for hands-on help building yours, visit sidecarleader.com.

Peter Haas on AI, Content Creation, and the Future of Church Governance

Peter Haas, lead pastor of Substance Church and author of Happy Church Governance, Broken Escalators, and Pharisectomy, joins the show for a wide-ranging conversation on how artificial intelligence is reshaping sermon writing, content creation, and church leadership. Peter has been in ministry for nearly 30 years and pulls back the curtain on how he uses tools like ChatGPT, Notebook LM, Gemini, and Claude to vectorize his sermon archive, build custom writing style guides, and speed up (without replacing) the creative process behind two sermons a week.

The conversation digs into the real ethical questions pastors are wrestling with around AI in ministry — from plagiarism and sourcing to why AI-generated sermons tend to stay "vanilla" and avoid the line of conviction. Peter also shares why he thinks the next wave of church staffing will split between people who train AI and people who babysit it, and how his doctoral research is using data to predict volunteer burnout, discipleship habits, and the felt-needs vs. real-needs gap in spiritual formation.

From there, the discussion shifts to church governance and organizational health. Peter unpacks the premise behind Happy Church Governance — that a church's bylaws can predict its life expectancy — and explains why most churches don't die from a lead pastor's moral failure, but from a board that becomes too risk-averse to deploy its own assets. He also breaks down the six-to-ten-year tradeoff between earning authority (as a planter) versus earning assets (as a successor), and why every model of church governance protects one group at the expense of another.

Whether you're a lead pastor, executive pastor, or nonprofit leader trying to figure out how AI fits into your ministry — and how to build governance structures that actually serve your church's calling — this episode is packed with frameworks you can put to use immediately.

In this episode:

• How Peter uses AI to write sermon metadata, YouTube descriptions, and small group discussion questions in seconds instead of hours
• Why AI-generated sermons will never fully replace a pastor's voice — and where the technology actually helps
• The "Why Factor of Three" technique for mining deeper sermon insights
• What actually causes most churches to stop growing after their founding pastor
• Why Peter believes every church should be experimenting with AI, thoughtfully and ethically
• A preview of Peter's doctoral research on predicting spiritual growth and volunteer burnout using data

Want to build a clearer roadmap for your team's next 12 months? Visit sidecarleader.com/coaching to learn more about our team planning and coaching services.

Most pastors don't know how to lead the high-capacity business leaders sitting in their church—and those leaders are often just one invitation away from a breakthrough. In this episode of The Sidecar Leader, Executive Pastor Nate Puccini shares how he went from a lonely, workaholic millionaire running 21 business locations to giving it all up to serve the local church.

Nate gets honest about the isolation of senior leadership, the marriage he thought was beyond repair, and the moment a 21-year-old intern's simple invitation changed the entire trajectory of his life. He unpacks the three questions Pastor Peter asked that exposed what success had been hiding—about spiritual disciplines, accountability, and godly mentorship—and why "teachability is the ability to relearn what you think you already know."

If you're a pastor or ministry leader wrestling with how to pastor affluent, influential, or entrepreneurial people without feeling intimidated, this conversation is for you. Nate breaks down how to create real space for high-capacity volunteers, why your growth track can't stop at coffee ministry, and how casting a God-sized vision (one that's actually too big for you) gives people a purpose worth serving. You'll also hear the story behind Substance Church becoming the largest food distribution site in Minnesota—and why the secret was equipping the saints, not relying on a name.

This is a must-listen for lead pastors, executive pastors, and nonprofit leaders who want to engage their people beyond the usher line, build leadership pipelines that scale, and discover the leaders God has already called to their vision.