In this special rushed episode of the unSeminary Podcast, Rich unpacks the biggest nonfiction book launch in history: Alex Hormozi’s $100M Book Launch. Alex didn’t rely on TikTok trends, billboards, or mass media. Instead, he orchestrated a carefully choreographed campaign that leaned heavily on email — sometimes sending seven to nine emails in a single day!

So what can your church learn from this? I pull out three big lessons that every church leader should pay attention to:

I hope this episode helps translate these lessons into practical steps for your church, so you can strengthen your communication, deepen your invite culture, and move more people toward Jesus.

If you’re ready to sharpen one of the most important five minutes in your weekend service, don’t miss the Hosting Coaching Clinic … a six-week training designed to dramatically improve your service hosting. Each week includes actionable video lessons, best-in-class hosting examples, and tools to eliminate awkward moments, refine your “ask,” and boost engagement.

Use the code ALEX at checkout to get 50% off. This is the perfect next step to put these communication lessons into action. Click here to enroll today

IMAGE NOTE: No, I haven’t met Alex. The banner image is AI-generated and intended to serve as a pattern interrupt, following Hormozi’s style.

Thanks for joining us at the unSeminary podcast. Today we’re talking with Taylor Scott-Reimer, a dynamic speaker, advocate, and author of She Believed: Recovering the Fierce Faith of the Women of Scripture — and Ourselves.

Is your church truly inviting the full participation of women? Are female leaders empowered to speak, shape, and serve—or are they silently sidelined? Tune in as Taylor shares a practical framework to help churches reframe the narrative, restore the practice, and reclaim the voice of women—so that the whole body of Christ can flourish.

Grab a copy of Taylor’s book, She Believed: Recovering the Fierce Faith of the Women of Scripture — and Ourselves, on Amazon. Learn more about Taylor at taylorscottreimer.carrd.co and find her on Instagram.

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!

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Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. Listen, you’re gonna wanna lean in on today’s conversation. I know that this is an issue in your church. It’s kind of thing that that you really should be wrestling with, thinking about. It’s not the kind of thing that should be on the back burner.

Rich Birch — It’s the kind of conversation that you should be having with your staff team, you should be thinking about with, various leaders in your church. It’s going to be a super helpful and challenging and encouraging conversation. Excited to have Taylor Scott-Reimer with us. She’s a writer, speaker, and passionate advocate for building a church where women’s voices are not just welcomed, but they’re needed.

Rich Birch — She’s written a recent book that I want you to pick up for your team called She Believed: recovering the fierce face of fierce not face fierce faith of women of scripture and ourselves. Through this book she’s invites you, our readers, to rediscover the fierce forgotten women of scripture the prophets, preachers, judges, and warriors who refuse to shrink from their faith ah or callings. Taylor, welcome to the show – so glad you’re here.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — I’m so glad to be here. Thanks for having me, Rich.

Rich Birch — Yeah, this is going to be great. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background? Kind of give us the the story, the Taylor story. Tell us about your, you know, yeah, just tell us about your background.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up deeply immersed in church life. My dad is a Presbyterian minister. And as a kid, I seriously loved church. I was the kind of kid who really enjoyed ah youth group Bible studies, just being around and part of our community.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — But over time, as I grew up and kind of moved away from my home church and encountered wider Christianity and the wider church world, I started to notice something that when we were having those conversations about leadership and calling and just more of the business and leadership side of church, it was really like the women in the room disappeared.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — And of course, not physically, they were often there, but there was something going on spiritually. We were expected to serve, but not to speak, to show up, but to not shape. And as I worked in ministry myself, I started to experience this deep ache that maybe maybe my voice didn’t belong. Maybe I was wrong on this issue.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — And “She Believed” was really born out of this ache. When I became a mom to my daughter and then to my son, I really was experiencing this tension of wanting to pass on a faith that affirmed and liberated and introduced my daughter to my personal savior, Jesus.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — But that also was ah enough for my son to be able to respect and to understand women as co-creators of the new garden. So that led me to writing “She Believed”. And it’s a reclaiming of space for myself, yes, but more importantly, for the many women who love Jesus deeply and yet have been told that they’re not allowed to lead boldly.

Rich Birch — Well, want to, so you’ve said something that really caught my attention that I want to kind of double click on and hear a little bit more. You said that there’s a deep but quiet pain. That that is a it’s powerful phraseology, uh, that many women experience in the church. Tell me about that. Talk that through, help us unpack that. What does that actually look like? What is that? How does that show up in a woman’s life? How is that, you know, how have you experienced that? How do you see that happening around us? How could that be happening in our church?

Taylor Scott-Reimer — Yeah, of course. Yeah, I think it’s the pain of just being spiritually disqualified whether explicitly or implicitly. It’s sitting in pews week after week but never really hearing a woman’s story preached. Never really seeing a woman and lead from a pulpit and never being asked what you think God is saying and being invited to bring your unique female perspective to the church.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — And that that kind of exclusion isn’t always loud, but I think what’s really insidious about it is that it’s formative. And over time, it teaches women to shrink their faith to fit a mold which stifles our spiritual growth, our creativity, and our courage. And as a result, we as a church, we miss out on the fullness of discipleship because half of the church is watching from the sidelines instead of participating on the field.

Rich Birch — Well, yeah, and I would echo that this this, you know, the issue you’re pushing on here has been my experience when I’ve interacted with prevailing churches that are making a huge difference. I look around those tables and I see it’s not all it’s not all men. There are often lots of women in the room leading, which is wonderful. Obviously a good thing we want want to we want to have have happen. We want to continue to kind of accelerate that.

Rich Birch — But my so my assumption, my thought as you’re as you’re as I was kind of listening to you unpacking what you talked about in in “She Believed”, is that this kind of quietening, silencing, sidelining, like that can happen even in a church that would maybe even theologically be like, I’m totally okay with having women lead, you know, and in all positions. Even in that, we’re not talking about churches that even necessarily just have a theological, you know, can, you know, bent towards limiting women’s voices. It can happen even in, ah you know, more, you know, in other churches. Is that true? Help us understand that.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — Yeah, 100%. I think that is completely true. It’s it’s that difference between it’s not necessarily explicit exclusion, but it’s insidious and it it creeps up into our churches, whether we realize it or not. And I think it’s helpful to have these conversations where we can call it out and we can work and really ask the women who are around the table, if they are around the table, what is your actual experience? And creating such an environment where we can really dig into that. Because, Rich, this is important stuff. This is half the body of Christ we’re talking about.

Rich Birch — 100%. Yes. Yes.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — And yeah, yeah, we can do better.

Rich Birch — Absolutely. Well, and there’s that great irony of like, and I’ve said this in other contexts as well, not just in the kind of talking about this issue. The great irony is you walk into most churches and 60% the people, it’s even 50%, 60% of the people, 70% of the people in that room are women. Lots of churches skew towards there being more women engaged than men engaged. And even in those environments, there this I can see this happen.

Rich Birch — Well, in your book, you offer a three-step framework, something for us to think about. Can you help us kind of think through, even at a high level, to kind of talk that through a little bit?

Taylor Scott-Reimer — Yeah, totally. So high level, right off the bat, the framework is really simple. I think we need to be reframing the narrative, restoring the practice, and reclaiming the voice. So this really starts with our theology.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — So how we preach, how we teach, and how we talk about women in scripture. While writing this book, I encountered so many sources that delved into the stories of women in the Bible, but were so obviously written by men and centering the male experience of those texts. Reading things about how, ah you know, Rahab, when the Jewish spies go and ah scout out the city and they join her in a brothel and the text doesn’t address why are they in the brothel. What’s going on there? And what what would it have been like for Rahab, a woman, to not only have been exploited economically and societally, but then have the opportunity to meet God.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — And that’s that’s such a different conversation, that’s such a different sermon when it’s preached by ah by a woman and through her lived experience. So this really, really starts foundationally with reframing the narrative.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — And then it moves into church practice. So how we create space for women to serve and lead in meaningful ways. And meaningful ways is the important part here. Ways that allow them to show up authentically as their full selves.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — I’m a new mom myself, so showing up at a church and being told that I can listen to the sermon, but it’s in the family room. Or I can listen to the sermon, ah but I’m going to be in the hallway with my children during it. These are real, real things that are happening.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — So we need to think through our physical spaces, but also just the spaces and the culture that we’re creating as a church. Are we allowing, again, I’ve already said it, but half the body of ah believers to show up in a way that’s real to them. And finally, it’s really about voice.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — Helping women rediscover their agency and authority in community and in calling. And again, I really think this comes back to ah reading the stories of women in scripture and hearing their voices and interpreting it ah with a female-centered lens.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — It’s not a to-do list for churches, but it is a reimagining of what a healthy, vibrant discipleship can look like when women are no longer missing from the story, but are able to see themselves as important aspects of of this story

Rich Birch — Love it. I love it. And, you know, I got to say a part of what your work convicted me, even as I was reflecting on like, I feel like I’ve, I’ve worked, been a part of, led in great churches that are fantastic places. But even this idea of, I we we’ve never done, I’ve never been a part of like, hey, we’re going to do six weeks on, let’s look at six incredible female leaders in the Bible. Let’s look at six, you know, we just have never, and that would be, that would be the kind of thing that we’ve done in other kinds, like the kind of treatment of the text that we would have done in for other things, but we’ve never done that in this.

Rich Birch — I would say we’re the churches I’ve led in. We’re not probably on the extreme where it’s like the only time we talk about it as Proverbs 31 on Mother’s Day. Like that’s the only time we bring it up. It’s not that. But I like this idea of reframing the narrative. Maybe we could unpack that a little bit. Help us kind of imagine and kind of think a bit differently around that. I think that could be a really practical step for people to take away, which is, hey, how can we ensure that we’re infusing, highlighting, taking more time to point out some of the parts of the narrative that maybe we’ve just overlooked in the past? Help help us unpack that.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — Yeah, well I really think when women only get to see themselves in scripture and in sermons as helpers or background characters in God’s stories, they subconsciously assume that that’s all they’re allowed to be.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — But when we can reframe this narrative and really claim it, everything changes. We know representation matters. Theological representation matters.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — When we lift up women with voices like Deborah, like the Jewish midwives, Mary Magdalene, Priscilla, Phoebe, Dorcas, suddenly the story gets so much richer. And I really think this is what we’ve been missing as a church. When women begin to see themselves as part of God’s story, they’re able to preach, to build, to speak truth. And what really happens is it’s like spiritual oxygen. It makes room for new callings to emerge, new stories to be told. And the Holy Spirit to come through all of us.

Rich Birch — I love that. I’m going to take advantage of the fact that you’re an expert in this area, ask you for some coaching on this. So let’s say I’m like, hey, that sounds like a good idea. Like my natural inclination or what’s that my hesitancy in the back of my brain is like, that’s like a fantastic idea for like a four or six week series. We’re going to do, we’re going to have like six weeks of women preaching on, I’ll have people on my team whatever, preach through all these things. That would be amazing.

Rich Birch — But then there’s, there’s a part of me that says, am I just ghettoizing this, this, through that, is that actually helping? Or am I is it one of those situations where helping hurts actually by kind of highlighting um you know the you know, this in kind of its own special thing. It’s like, the you know, it’s the thing that it’s like the churches that do the like, it’s youth Sunday. It’s like, that doesn’t really mean that you’re integrating youth to the church. It just means that you gave as a Sunday up for them. Help me. Maybe I’m just like overthinking it. It’s like, no, Rich, that’s a good idea. You should do that. Help us think through that. What what should we be thinking about?

Taylor Scott-Reimer — Yeah, I think the first thing that just comes to mind, Rich, when you say that is if you are a church who isn’t highlighting women’s stories, let’s start with that. If you’ve never done speaker series where you highlighted intentionally ah the the voices of women, maybe this is the push you need ah to to do that.

Rich Birch — Right.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — Because representation starts with things like that. We need those initiatives. to kind of get the ball rolling. Now, if you’re a church that, you know, again, we said at the beginning it’s 2025, maybe you’ve had these conversations. Maybe this is something that’s already happening in your church. I think getting to the point where we have more mature conversations. One of the things I hear often when I preach through our “She Believes” series is, I didn’t know we were allowed to talk about that in church, or I didn’t know we were allowed to say that out loud.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — And I think what’s really healing about these types of conversations is that it shows just the breadth and depth of God’s love for us within the human experience. And it lets us know that we can have these conversations, that God is big enough that we can challenge, we can ask questions, we can say, hey, you know what, what you just said really hurt me or that what you just said wasn’t fair. And be invited to really understand and move through those emotions as our full selves.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — God created us with the full spectrum of human emotion. And I often feel that sometimes women are only invited to bring some of those emotions into the church. In small group settings settings, I’ve seen women cry, laugh, really challenge each other. And most importantly, remember who God made them to be.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — So this devotional, “She Believed”, is designed to create that space. It’s less about arriving at answers or having a theological debate about women in leadership and spiritual headship and all of those kind of things, and more just about reclaiming that space and allowing people to wrestle honestly and faithfully and bringing in all of their questions.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — We’ve seen a lot of conversation in the last little while about deconstruction, reconstruction, all of that stuff. I think this is part of the piece of naming, explaining, and just being ready to hold the whole capacity of human experience and human emotion because God created it and it’s not something scary.

Rich Birch — So the, you know, in this you’ve provided, which is fantastic discussion questions, obviously it’s like a, Hey, we could do this in a group. We could have a, you know, conversation. You kind of touched on that little bit. I wonder if you could unpack stories you’ve heard or how has that impacted helped, you know, as you’ve invited people into this discussion to reflect wrestles, you know, and speak together, how, you know any kind of sense of the impact that that’s having or any kind of interesting stories along that line?

Taylor Scott-Reimer — Yeah, I would say one of the things that really struck me is I just finished preaching through “She Believed” at my home church where I grew up and where I was raised. Many, many women in our congregation came up to me afterwards with tears in their eyes just, and I realized in that moment that a lot of our older generations of believers haven’t been invited to have these conversations out in the open.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — They’re conversations that have happened in the kitchen and in the nursery, but not necessarily from the pulpit. And allowing the older generation of women to be affirmed, and to have the ways in which patriarchy has hurt them named is a deeply, deeply healing experience. But also for younger women like myself, new moms, women working, being able to see the the stories of scripture without the sanitized lens of helpers, what have you, has been super helpful.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — And cultural cues are powerful, especially especially in the church. So you can have all the right theology about women’s leadership on paper, but if your platform never reflects that, the signal doesn’t land.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — Modeling is a ministry in and of itself, And when women see others women, women leading with authority, with authenticity, showing up as themselves with breast milk stained shirts and [inaudible], we normalize it. And that’s how we build a church that’s that’s more reflective of God’s kingdom and frankly, more suited for a ministry in 2025, where we’re stripping back the camera.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love it. So good. And again, I think this would be a great ah great resource for church leaders to pick up, to wrestle through, to think about, you know, to have you come and speak. I think there’s lots that could happen there. I think that’s amazing.

Rich Birch — This is a bit of an unfair question. I asked my friend Kadi Cole this when she was on the episode. I should have told you this ahead of time. I’m pulling the rug out from underneath of you.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — All right, let’s do it.

Rich Birch — But hopefully we’re friends enough to ask this question. So and I know this book is not really answering that question. You’re not really wrestling with what I’m about to ask you. But I just want you’re in this. You’re thinking about these things.

Rich Birch — Do you think that if you think of the the broadly evangelical church, not like people ask me if I’m evangelical, it’s like, it depends on what you mean by that. Like, if you mean someone who takes the teaching of Jesus seriously, yes, I am evangelical. if If that’s what you mean, there’s lots of other cultural freight to that word that I don’t associate with. But I’m, you know, like in that in that church, whatever that church is, however you describe that, do do you think that this, the issue here is more of a sticky floor issue or a glass ceiling? Is it more that women are not leaning in where there’s maybe more opportunity there than then there they’re choosing to be a part of? Or is it a glass ceiling problem? There’s actually like systemic, and maybe it’s it’s obviously both.

Rich Birch — There’s obviously both of those dynamics happening. But which of those do you think is kind of the the side of the equation that we need to be thinking about or should be wrestling with. Again, it’s not, it’s it’s adjacent to “She Believed”. It’s not directly what you’re talking about. But but what do what do you think? Again, unfair question. What do you think?

Taylor Scott-Reimer — No, I love it, Rich. That’s awesome. I think you were already kind of pointed to it, but I do think it’s both. It is a glass ceiling issue of if there’s no room, there’s no room. We need to make room. But it is also a little bit of the the need to just empower daughters of Christ ah to to take that space. And if it’s not available to make that space.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — I notice a lot of the times in my own experience of evangelical Christian world, however you define it, there’s a lot of mentoring opportunities for for Christian young men um that Christian women aren’t being invited into. I think of an example for myself.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — I went to a Christian university. I absolutely loved my experience there. But I had professors who abided by the Billy Graham rule, right, of not being a alone with a woman. How does that translate into career opportunities and mentorship for daughters of Christ if their professors won’t sit down and have a conversation with them? How does that transfer into internships and pastoral ministry if people aren’t engaging with women in that mentoring capacity to affirm their gifts, but to also tell them ah how to use them for the church.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — I think ah women are grieving this, and the church is grieving this. We’re missing out on half of the body because of it. But some of the most powerful leadership I’ve seen really comes through this grief and this acknowledgement that it is both of those issues, the glass ceiling, we need to make the space, we need to do the work, but it is also empowering daughters of Christ to to live to their calling.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, so good. and ah And I’ve talked about this on other episodes, but like my own personal experience with the Billy Graham rule, like I have a ah certain sense of I have been the benefactor. Listen, I am a like middle-aged white guy. I am like, I check a lot of the boxes that are, you know, born in a fairly affluent family in the West, white guy, you know, at ah at of a great time.

Rich Birch — I was born in 1974, the lowest birthright year of the 20th century, which gave me a significant leg up. And I, in that particular issue, I have, there ah there was a a, and I’ve said that I’m only saying this again to to point out ah to other folks. I’m not trying to make this about me, but there was a week early on in my ministry. I was a young leader in my twenties where we were trying, we were stuck as a church. And like, there was another church, a very large church, literally like 10 times our size, who I knew they had solved this problem. And I reached out to a leader there and I said, listen, can I just come and hang out at your church for the week?

Rich Birch — And he was like, what? And I was like, yeah, I just want to like sit in in all your meetings and like take a bunch of notes and you don’t have to talk to me. You don’t need to you don’t need to do anything. I just want to be around. I just want to try to see what I can learn from that experience. And he graciously said yes. By the end of that week where I’m like having dinner at his house, hanging out, um you know. We’ve become friends. We’re now lifelong friends. That week was absolutely an inflection point in my leadership. Like I was like, oh, my goodness, I saw things differently.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — Right.

Rich Birch — I know that that leader, if I was a woman that had called him and said, hey, can I just hang out for the week? I don’t think that would have happened. I think he would have said, ah well, maybe come, we got a conference coming up next month or next year. Why don’t you come to the conference and we can, why don’t we see each other after a session or something like would have been probably what he would have said. That’s, and that’s not a slight on him. That’s just a slight on the culture. What’s all all around that.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — Yeah.

Rich Birch — And so, yeah, that’s a, that is a very real issue. I think we have to create that space. So you touched the Billy Graham rule and it like touched a part of me and I was like, oh, I got to talk about that. So yeah.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — Right?

Rich Birch — Well, let’s get back to your content. So you’ve given us a ah PDF that we’re going to link to. It’s called Seven Days to Reclaim Your Voice, a devotional guide for women. And I would say men. I went through this. I think this is fantastic. I know what you mean by that. But I think this a fantastic resource. Talk to us about this resource. We’ll link to it.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — Yeah, awesome. So this is this a great resource to kind of get the the ball rolling, whether that’s ah around the table in your staff meetings or for your own personal use. The resource works through seven women of scripture, and it’s a quick daily reflection. And then my book, “She Believed”, which is coming out later this summer and will be available on Amazon, really delves into these topics in a fuller way.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — Again, I think we’ve mentioned this, but something I’ve really intentionally done with She Believed is this is not this is not the place for a theological argument.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — This is the place for women and men, by extension, who have been hurt by the church, have been hurt by the ways that patriarchy has played out in the church and that ah that need ah that pastoral hug um and that commissioning that you are doing God’s work and there is ah there’s a lot of work to be done.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I really appreciate this fantastic. And I appreciate you redirecting. I’ve been pushing us towards, let’s talk about this issue. And I know obviously it’s connected to what you’re talking about, but but I love the underlying push of like, hey, we got to get back to scripture. Let’s look at these stories. Let’s engage women on this and let’s ensure that we’re looking at ah scripture from that lens. I think is is critically important.

Rich Birch — Listen, there might be some pastors that are listening who want to do better. They’re like, they’ve they have listened to this conversation and they’re like, man, I really do want to take a new start here. I feel like we’ve got a you know, I would say a step they could take would be to buy your book, which we’ll talk in a minute where people can get that when it comes out.

Rich Birch — But what what’s another kind of step or something they should be thinking about as kind of a first step in this direction to be like, Hey, we need to do a better job kind of regardless of where they’re at in this, in this area.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — Yeah, totally. I would say ah next little bit, low hanging fruit look at ah look at the narrative that you’re telling from the pulpit. Look at your preaching calendar for the next few months and ask whose stories are we telling? Whose voices are we centering?

Rich Birch — So good.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — This might be looking and seeing who the preachers are, like we’ve already talked about. Are they male or female? But also, are we preaching about all male prophets? Are we preaching about all male disciples? Can we do better here? Can we include some of these voices that have been historically disenfranchised?

Taylor Scott-Reimer — And then go deeper, invite women in your congregation into that conversation.

Rich Birch — So good.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — I wanna say to your pastors listening, particularly if they’re male pastors, is this isn’t all on you. Tap in, see who’s in your conversation, ask them what kinds of stories or sermons that they wish they heard of more often. I think oftentimes as pastors and ministers, people assume it’s all on them, but people in your congregation will be able to give you a sense of what’s actually happening beside behind the scenes.

Rich Birch — That’s so good.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — Small groups are a great place to start these conversations where people already know each other more intimately and can speak more authentically. The goal isn’t to really overhaul everything overnight, but it is to start seeing what’s missing and to commit to filling those gaps with courage and care.

Rich Birch — Well, where do we want to send people to ah pick up not a copy, but copies? I think this would be, to me, this is done best in community. It’s like, this is a staff team resource. This is a, hey, we’re going to do with our small groups. We’re going to buy couple hundred copies and do with the entire church. Like it’s that kind of thing. I think it’s it’s best made for in community. Where do we want to send people to pick up copies?

Taylor Scott-Reimer — Yeah, 100%. So the book is coming out this August. So you can find, or you will be able to find “She Believed” on Amazon, both print and ebook formats. And if you head to my website, which we provided for you, ah there’s a free downloadable discussion guide that we’ve kind of already highlighted and mentioned to help guide you to use it in starting these conversations.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — And yeah, you can follow me on Instagram @taylorreimer96 and stick along for the journey. I’m really, really excited about this project. It’s it’s kind of a new thing for me to be stepping into. And I just, I’m really passionate about it. And I’m so thankful, Rich, for the opportunity to share it with you and your listeners.

Rich Birch — Yeah, any any last words, last encouragements you’d say ah just as we wrap up today’s episode?

Taylor Scott-Reimer — Yeah, I was struck by a line this morning. I’m I’m of ah a certain demographic. I believe we’re called Zennials. I think that’s what it is. I’m the Gen Z Millennial kind of.

Rich Birch — Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, right, right.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so full disclosure, was on TikTok this morning and I saw a TikTok…

Rich Birch — That’s great.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — …like why… Yeah, yeah. How hard could it be – boys do it? And it was young women showing what they don’t think that they’re able to do, but men do all the time.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — And I was kind of struck by: how hard could it be boys do it? And I think that’s something we as women in the church need to remember.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — People do it. We can do it.

Rich Birch — Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. Well, this has been great. Listen, I want to like honor you publicly. I thank you for writing this book. I thank you for sticking your neck out here and raising a good question, doing it in just a super elegant way and helping us think through these issues and really hopefully encouraging, you know, some folks to, to think differently and to move forward in this. So I really appreciate this, Taylor. Thanks for being here.

Rich Birch — And we’ll link to all of that in the show notes, friends. You can you can get all that there. But thanks for being here today. Thank you so much.

Taylor Scott-Reimer — Thank you.

Welcome back to another episode of the unSeminary podcast. Today we’re talking with Zenzo Matoga, Senior Pastor of Impact Church in Boston, Massachusetts. Originally from Malawi, Africa, Zenzo brings a passion for evangelism shaped by the revival crusades of Reinhard Bonnke. Under Zenzo’s leadership, Impact Church has become one of the fastest-growing churches in America, thriving in one of the nation’s most unchurched cities.

Is your church struggling to move evangelism from a program to a culture? Zenzo shares practical strategies and spiritual insights that have helped Impact Church ignite revival in a spiritually dry place, equipping believers to impact one person at a time.

To learn more about Impact Church and Pastor Zenzo’s resources, visit impactpeople.org. His book Impact One: The Epic Prayer That Transforms Friends and Family is available on Amazon and other online retailers.

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!

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Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you’ve decided to tune in. Really looking forward to today’s conversation, an opportunity to dive in on a conversation that really all of our churches should be wrestling with.

Rich Birch — Honored, privileged to have Zenzo Matoga with us. He is the senior pastor at a church called Impact Church that has, if I’m counting correctly, two locations in Massachusetts. They’re one of the fastest growing churches in the country. He’s also a seasoned worship leader. And I think this is a first for our podcast, a Dove Award nominated songwriter and author. So excited to have you on this the show today, Zenzo. Thank you for being here.

Zenzo Matoga — Thank you so much for having me, Rich. It’s such an honor to be here with you.

Rich Birch — This is wonderful. Impact has experienced you know incredible growth in these last number of years. And I’d love for you to kind of tell us a little bit about the church, bring us up on the journey and and tell us what God’s doing in your church these days.

Zenzo Matoga — Yes, so this next month here in September we’re going to be celebrating 10 years. So it’s been 10 years of ministry and we are in Boston, Massachusetts of all the places in the world.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Zenzo Matoga — It’s been named the fifth most unchurched city in all of America. And so um you know people told me Boston is a very dry place and I thought to myself last time I checked dry places catch on fire faster than any other place it’s so so that…

Rich Birch — Oh, I like that. I like that. Nothing like a a cemetery for if you want a resurrection, right? Same thing.

Zenzo Matoga — There you go. There you go. That got us excited, you know, but it’s been an honor you know to do ministry here, you know, 10 years of incredible ministry. I’m originally from Malawi, Africa

Rich Birch — Oh, nice. Okay.

Zenzo Matoga — Very, very small country. So it’s humbling to be in this nation and preaching the gospel. Yes, I’m a worship leader first. So I started leading worship in what we call the African revivals that were led by a man called Reinhard Bonnke, who literally saw 79 million salvations in those crusades. And so I just adopted this passion for evangelism, this this passion for evangelism.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Zenzo Matoga — Except back then it used to happen through crusades, big crusades. And when I moved to America the Lord said teach the Americans how to win their unchurched loved ones.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Zenzo Matoga — That’s gonna be the key to evangelism. So in a nutshell, we’ve built Impact Church on that, you know, the Great Commission. That’s why we named the church Impact Church. It says, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, the Holy Spirit.

Zenzo Matoga — And so, yeah, make disciples. Who make disciples? Who make disciples? Who make disciples? And that’s church growth. That’s revival. It was never meant to be rocket science, if you’re making disciples, not converts.

Rich Birch — That’s so good. Well, I’m looking forward to digging in and learning from you today and and the good just the good stories, the good things that are happening at Impact.

Rich Birch — You know, many pastors want a vibrant evangelism and discipleship culture at their church, but it really is can be really challenging for many churches to create that. Why do you think that is? What are some of the obstacles that you’ve seen other churches face, you know, why why do you think this is? It’s like so core to who we’re supposed to be, but why is it why is it so tough so so so many times?

Zenzo Matoga — Yeah. Well, number one, I believe that the very art of making disciples was never meant to be too easy. There are challenges there, but there are beautiful challenges. So if you’re facing challenges, hey, welcome to the club. You’re heading in the right direction. Don’t be discouraged.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Zenzo Matoga — I also feel that many pastors and churches and leaders, they they copy from other churches, you know. And it’s okay to learn from others, right? But when you’re copying something and you don’t receive it by revelation, because listen, to Moses, he said, use a stick. To Joshua, he said, march around the city. The power was not in walking around and the power was definitely not in the stick. The power was in the instruction, you know.

Rich Birch — Right.

Zenzo Matoga — And so I think it’s good to to pray, study your city. There’s a key that unlocks every city. You got to find that key. Whoever finds that key will unlock that city.

Zenzo Matoga — And so, and I think, ah and you can learn what others are doing, right? But sometimes people copy things, but then they just, they don’t follow through, or they start and they stop and they try something else, and then they try something else and then they go to that conference, pick up something else and try. Because most of these strategies, you got to, you got to see them through and you got to be patient.

Rich Birch — That’s so good.

Zenzo Matoga — You got to be patient for them to produce, you know. It’s like, you know, revival sometimes is like pounding the ground so that you can build a spring or rather you can break ground so that there can be a spring that gushes out. But you can’t just do that. You can’t do that for two days. You can’t do that for one day, you know. And sometimes you encounter rocks and you’ve got to break through that and keep going. And so I feel like sometimes people start and stop, start and stop. There has to be a long-term commitment to the strategy that the Lord gives you. Yeah.

Rich Birch — Well, there’s a lot there I’d love to unpack. You talk about ah you know every seat every city has a key that to unlock you know that and and leaders are part of our job is to find that. Unpack that a bit more. Tell me a little bit about that. What has that looked like for you at Impact as you’ve considered? I do think as, ah ah I think there’s an interesting advantage that you have as someone from outside the culture coming in to to see the culture. I actually think that’s a huge strategic advantage that God’s given you. So help us understand that. Unpack that a little bit more.

Zenzo Matoga — Yeah, for sure. You know, every city has a key. Whoever has that key and will unlock it, you know.

Zenzo Matoga — And so, yeah, I think it’s good to study your city. And also every church has a calling, right? I don’t think I don’t think our churches are supposed to reach everybody. I think you have to know who you’re called to reach, you know. And then find the key that unlocks those type of people. For us here in Boston, We wanted to reach you know young professionals. And amazingly, in doing that, they brought their parents and later on grandparents, you know.

Rich Birch — Right.

Zenzo Matoga — But we wanted to focus on those. And so one, I wanted to create a welcoming a welcoming atmosphere, welcoming environment. I wanted to create a culture that was authentic because Millennials, Gen Zs, Gen Alphas, you know, you can’t reach them if you’re not authentic.

Zenzo Matoga — So from the get, I knew that I was going to use personal stories. It was going to be self-duplicating stories, but with integrity, right? Like the like the young people say, not forcing anything, but just really telling them here’s a story. I started talking about the issues my wife and I had um at the beginning of our marriage. I mean we’ve been married 19 years and always say we’ve had the best 16 years of our lives you know because the first three, first three was very rough.

Rich Birch — Okay.

Zenzo Matoga — She’s she’s Italian American. I’m African and I quickly found out that the the jungle spirit in me did not agree with the mafia spirit in our you know so we almost started World War III, you know.

Rich Birch — Wow.

Zenzo Matoga — But we we we were going to tell our stories, we were going to utilize humor, we were going to be honest, and we were going to train the young people to also be authentic. Tell your story. One the best things you can ever do is tell your story, you know.

Zenzo Matoga — We overcome by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of our testimony. you know And they did not love their lives to shrink back from death. Sometimes people are afraid to share their story, your powerful testimony. Let people know what God has done. It creates an atmosphere where where there’s a culture of grace where people are not afraid of church people and they think like they’re better than us, you know, or I’ll never be like them.

Zenzo Matoga — I’ll never, you know, I’m drinking right now and I’m smoking and I’m doing this. I’ll probably never be like them. Well, a bunch of us used to do that, you know. So if you can tell your story, share your testimony, create an authentic environment.

Zenzo Matoga — I don’t know how much to share now, but also, you know, from from the book Impact One, let me just jump in that. I wanted to teach our church members how to reach their unchurched loved ones. To me, the key to Boston was if I can teach a typical churchgoer how to reach your unchurched loved ones, if I can teach you to just impact one, right?

Zenzo Matoga — In the next three months, if I can just teach you to impact one person, bring them into the house of God, and then, you know, some people can impact three, some can maybe do five, but every year, every believer has to be a producing believer, not a barren producer. I mean, not a barren believer. And so yeah, I wrote that book. I wrote that book just for the members of our church.

Rich Birch — Right.

Zenzo Matoga — It’s a small book, four chapters only.

Rich Birch — Right.

Zenzo Matoga — Chapter one is ah is is just get the burden for the lost. Ask God to break you with what breaks his heart concerning the lost. Start weeping again for the lost. You know, number two, pray for the one. So right just write three names down of people you want to win for Jesus, right?

Rich Birch — I love that.

Zenzo Matoga — Those people you’re eating Thanksgiving dinner with, you know, write write a few of those names. The people the the person who’s always next to you in the gym working out, right you know, write their name down.

Rich Birch — Right. Yeah.

Zenzo Matoga — And then chapter three was simple. Just become a good friend. Friendship evangelism. Just become a good friend. Billy Graham, before he passed away, he said he believes after doing all the crusades that this present day of America, that the best form of evangelism is friendship evangelism.

Zenzo Matoga — Sometimes Christians are not good friends. Just learn how to be a good friend.

Rich Birch — Sure.

Zenzo Matoga — You know and we we taught our church just be a good friend for a season with no strings attached. Just really show interest in those people.

Zenzo Matoga — And then number four is seal the deal. You know, sealing the deal means wait for the right moment. You know, they will ask you, they will ask you, where does your joy come from? You know, why are you not shaking about this? You talk about this church thing all the time. Tell me about that.

Rich Birch — Right. Right.

Zenzo Matoga — You know, a door open, then you seal the deal, you know. But ride the waves.

Rich Birch — Step in.

Zenzo Matoga — Ride the waves of the Holy Spirit like surfing. You know. And so let the opportunity be created. So to us, that was I think that was the key you know in a nutshell…

Rich Birch — Right. Love it.

Zenzo Matoga — …creating a welcoming atmosphere where there was authenticity and a culture of grace and then teaching these young people you know how to win Jesus.

Zenzo Matoga — And I think the final thing for me being a worshiper was we wanted to create an atmosphere where there was radical worship, radical worship. I’m in Boston. You know, it’s the mecca of education.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Zenzo Matoga — We have a quarter a million students. We have the most students than any other city in the world. We have Harvard University, MIT. And I felt a bit insecure, if I can be honest, ah Rich.

Zenzo Matoga — I was like, OK, I’m an African kid. I come from the third poorest country in the world. And I got no college degree, you know. Because I went into music route I wanted to go to school for music I couldn’t afford it…

Rich Birch — Right.

Zenzo Matoga — …and I just dove straight into music and the Lord blessed that, but I felt insecure. And the Lord said hey one of the keys to Boston is the foolishness of worship. I will confound the wisdom of the wise with the foolishness of radical worship and joy. Radical worship and joy, you know.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Zenzo Matoga — And so we worship radically and I found that people are looking you know for for for…

Rich Birch — That’s so good.

Zenzo Matoga — …a radical version of believers again, You know, people are not looking for ah nice alternative of what they’re already doing. No, they’re looking for something vibrant, something that’s embedded in revival and radical worship…

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that.

Zenzo Matoga — …and joy, joy, joy, joy. Yeah.

Rich Birch — I love that. I’d love to, we’re I’m going to put a a bookmark in that. I want to come back to that in a minute, but yeah I want to loop back on something you said earlier. You know, my sense is that one of the things you’ve been able to do at Impact is really see evangelism as a culture. It’s not a, it’s not a program. It’s not like a, hey, here’s a, you know, do this thing. It’s like a part of who we are. Talk us through how that um works itself out at Impact. What how are you ensuring that reaching out to unchurched folks in Boston, Bostonians, is a culture of impact rather than just a program? What’s that look like?

Zenzo Matoga — Yeah, Rich, I believe that’s the that’s the key, is that sometimes we go on this journey of making evangelism or discipleship these systems and classes. And and nothing wrong with that to supplement and complement what you have. But I believe that evangelism and discipleship has to be embedded in the culture of the church.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Zenzo Matoga — On our worst Sunday, we’re evangelistic and we’re making disciples. And so what what does that mean? For us, it’s simple. You know, yet again, for me, it kind of goes back to that book because I wrote that book to release that evangelism culture you know for our church.

Zenzo Matoga — I think, one, it begins a prayer. Are we praying for the lost? Are we earnestly praying for lost? But before we pray for the lost, are we broken with what breaks the heart of God concerning our city, the burden to see them? You know, are we do we want them saved just because we want our churches to grow, or do we sincerely want them to know God and not go to hell, right? That simple.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Zenzo Matoga — And so I think it starts there. And then after that, you know, we’ve started making it a culture. So every single Sunday, we pray this prayer, God, please give me one person to impact with your love and invite church.

Rich Birch — So good.

Zenzo Matoga — We pray that in our services every single Sunday. And then after that, Rich, we we show stories of people who have been impacted.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Zenzo Matoga — Because yet again, testimonies are so powerful. Last Sunday, we showed the story of Teddy. You know, Teddy was coming to Impact Church because a family friend invited him to church. Remember the prayer, God, please give me one person to impact with your love and invite church. So somebody prayed that prayer, and then invited Teddy to church. That was, he was their impact one prayer. And there are times when we pray that prayer, remember, we write three names down, practical. We write three names down. So somebody had Teddy as one of their…

Rich Birch — Right. Yes.

Zenzo Matoga — …and then invited him to church. He started coming to church, you know, kind of still drinking and doing other things, you know, and then kind of started coming to church and started dating this young lady.

Zenzo Matoga — And, you know, she got pregnant out of wedlock. But we continued to disciple them because it has to transition from evangelism to discipleship. We started reaching out to them one-on-one and some of our pastors and group leaders just discipling them. Long story short, those two are married now. They’ve got a child. And Teddy now leads our men’s groups, man.

Rich Birch — So good.

Zenzo Matoga — This young man is shepherding and caring for young men in our church, just men in general. And those groups have they’ve multiplied over and over and over and over, you know.

Rich Birch — Right.

Zenzo Matoga — And this summer we’re believing God for another 20 or so just, you know and he’s he’s the coach over that. So so yet again after the prayer you write the names down, we show the story so that people see it in real time of a life that has been changed, you know. And then after that in service we have this 60 seconds, social seconds, where we tell people to go greet one another. And they ask each other the question, who did you impact this week? You know, so you you’ve prayed the impact one prayer and you’ve seen the impact story.

Rich Birch — Right.

Zenzo Matoga — We call them stories of impact. You’ve seen an impact story. And then you have the chance to walk around, greet somebody and ask them, and hold them accountable. Who did you impact this week?

Rich Birch — That’s cool.

Zenzo Matoga — If they didn’t impact anybody, hey, come back next Sunday with the story of who you impacted, you know?

Rich Birch — Right. I love that.

Zenzo Matoga — And then that’s what’s happening in the service, right? So that that’s the evangelistic portions in the service, you know? And then I take ah take once a year and and in our series, and I do a whole series on how to win the lost.

Rich Birch — Oh, that’s great.

Zenzo Matoga — But then also in all my messages, there’s going to be a portion somewhere in all my messages where I’m talking about evangelism.

Zenzo Matoga — And then like was all this is happening inside the auditorium. Now, outside the auditorium, God gave us something called F15, and I wrote it in the book. So F15 is a code, you know, and it’s funny because when we got F15, I said, yeah, I think we officially code. That’s a joke, by the way.

Rich Birch — That’s funny.

Zenzo Matoga — But F15 simply stands for the first 15 minutes after church.

Rich Birch — Okay, yeah.

Zenzo Matoga — Don’t go to your cliques in the lobby.

Rich Birch — Okay, yeah.

Zenzo Matoga — Don’t run to your cliques. Don’t run to the people you already know. We treat during F15 during the first 15 minutes of service being over we treat our lobbies like a mission field. You sacrifice wanting to run to Jimmy because you’re buddies, you probably know Jimmy’s phone number and you probably can hang out and go to lunch later. But we’re going to sacrifice the first 15 minutes after service to look in…

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Zenzo Matoga — …our lobbies and parking lot for somebody who looks like they’re new to church, you know. And we’re going to and impact them, you know.

Rich Birch — That’s cool.

Zenzo Matoga — And how do we impact them? God gave us something as well called C.L.O.N.E., right?

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Zenzo Matoga — Because the Lord said, go make disciples. So go clone yourself, essentially.

Zenzo Matoga — So so C.L.O.N.E., the C stands for chronology. So during the F15, you walk to somebody, ah chronology, and you say, hey, how long have you been coming to Impact Church?

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love it.

Zenzo Matoga — And they’ll tell you five months, six months. Or today is my first day. And the L is location. Hey where do you live? Where do you live?

Rich Birch — Oh, so good.

Zenzo Matoga — And the O is occupation, you know – hey so what do you do for a living? And the N stands for number or mode of communication, you know. And I hear these days you don’t ask for phone numbers, so hey stands for DM’s as well – hey what’s your DM? You know.

Rich Birch — Yes. Yeah. What’s your Instagram handle? What’s your, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Zenzo Matoga — Yes, there you go, there you go. What’s your Instagram handle, how can I find you? And what’s remaining? The E. The E is encouragement. Hey, I’m so glad you came to Impact Church. I can’t wait to see you next Sunday. Do you have a ride? We can come pick you up. You can sit with our crew. We can hang out together.

Zenzo Matoga — I’ll see you right here, the same place next Sunday. And so I share with you all the stuff that are happening in the auditorium every single Sunday.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Zenzo Matoga — By the way, I’m giving you our secret sauce here, man.

Rich Birch — Yes. Yeah, it’s good. It’s good. Love it.

Zenzo Matoga — We need to give this because we need to win America for Jesus.

Rich Birch — Yeah, absolutely.

Zenzo Matoga — And then these are things that are happening outside the lobby, you know.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love it. And are you…

Zenzo Matoga — And then part of the encouragement…

Rich Birch — Where are you talking about F15? Like, are you, how often are you, because I love that. I think practically training our people on, hey, this exactly what you should do at the end of the service. Man, I think that’s transformational. Are you talking about that in that once a year series? Are you regularly kind of encouraging people? Hey, remember after the service today, we’re cloning, get a chance to talk to someone. What’s that look like?

Zenzo Matoga — Yes, I’m talking about that to the whole church when I do that that series in the year. But I’m telling Vision Sunday, I drop it again, Vision Sunday. Because I’m talking about our vision of the Impact Church. Our vision is to impact you so you can impact your world. To me, that’s the definition of discipleship.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s so good.

Zenzo Matoga — I’m not just impacting you to become a convert who comes, sit down.

Zenzo Matoga — I’m impacting you so you can impact your world. What’s your world? Your world is your business, your family, your workplace, and all those people. So we’re talking about that, yes, from the pulpit.

Zenzo Matoga — But in our leadership trainings, right, in our leadership orientations, in our growth tracks, next steps, classes, all that stuff, we’re talking about that. If you’re becoming a member of the church, if you’re getting assimilated into our church, we are putting this burden here, this beautiful, we call it the beautiful burden on you to be able to do that.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Zenzo Matoga — And not only are we talking about it, yet again, Rich, we’re doing it every Sunday. I’m praying the impact one prayer every Sunday after worship. We’re sharing the impact story. And then people are going to one another and asking, who have you impacted this week?

Rich Birch — Love it.

Zenzo Matoga — And then I’m doing I’m doing the series and teaching people, get the burden, you know, pray for the one, you know, write the names down. And and friendship evangelism, how do you become a good friend? How do you do that? How, you know, Jesus became a friend to Zacchaeus, you know. And then he waited for the conviction.

Zenzo Matoga — You know, it wasn’t Jesus who was like, change your life, do this. He just became a good friend. And the conviction came and then he sealed the deal. You know. So you teach the people how to seal the deal boldly with boldness.

Rich Birch — Yeah, so good.

Zenzo Matoga — You know, when somebody tells you, I’m struggling with this, don’t don’t don’t you bash, don’t don’t you become bashful. And you seal that deal with boldness. So I release the gift of faith over the people. I pray over them. And I during our impact one prayer, I tell them, hey, I pray and I’m believing God that before, you know, right now we’re in August.

Zenzo Matoga — So I’m telling them before the close of this year, I am believing that every member of this church will be responsible for at least one soul coming to the saving knowledge of Jesus. And we release the gift of faith and the burden, you

Rich Birch — Love it.

Zenzo Matoga — Yeah. And then part of the E.

Rich Birch — Sorry. Go ahead.

Zenzo Matoga — Yeah, I got to say this part of the E in encouragement in the clone, right, is also, hey, you can be a part of our small group.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Zenzo Matoga — So that E there is the final piece that transition you from evangelism to discipleship. If you invite somebody to church, you are responsible for also discipling them. So you’re responsible to not only bring them into the house of God, but you’re also responsible to invite them to your crew, invite them to your small group, give them a ride and see them through and just walk with them.

Zenzo Matoga — You know, and so that’s what creates evangelism and discipleship as a culture versus making announcements on a Sunday morning for people to attend some class.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Zenzo Matoga — That’s supplementary, man. We have that stuff too, but it’s supplemental.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Zenzo Matoga — Yeah.

Rich Birch — It’s so good. I love, well, first of all, I want to underline, I think it’s great how practical you’ve made this. You’ve you’ve given really clear next steps. I love that you’re training your people around this. I want to loop back because I said I was going to, and I’m intrigued to hear your thoughts on this around radical worship.

Rich Birch — I you know, I love that your background, you obviously are a passionate evangelist and you obviously are a passionate worship leader. And I think there can be a false dichotomy in a lot of churches that like those, that you can’t be a church that’s focused on reaching unchurched people at the same time as being a passionate worship environment. We sometimes see those as opposed to each other.

Rich Birch — Unpack that for me. How do those two work? Cause I would agree with you. I think, one of the changes I’ve seen in unchurched people over the time I’ve served is I do think what you’re talking about there is true. I think people are coming to church looking for something different than they were 20, 30 years ago. They and I think worship is a part of that. So unpack that. Talk me through the connection between radical worship and reaching unchurched people. How do those two things work together in your mind or and how are they working themselves out at Impact?

Zenzo Matoga — Yeah, and Rich, it’s Acts chapter 16, right? Paul and Silas ended up in the jail cell, and they were in there. What were they doing? Prayer and worship.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

Zenzo Matoga — It was so radical the other jailers heard them. It says to me it was loud and it was radical. Because because it’s loud in jail.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Zenzo Matoga — But people heard them. People heard them. And it was so radical it caused an earthquake, man.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Zenzo Matoga — And what happened? Chains broke. It wasn’t just the chains of the two people who were singing. It was the chains of everybody who was exposed to the worship…

Rich Birch — Right.

Zenzo Matoga — …and the and the radical environment.

Zenzo Matoga — And what amazes me is that at the end of that, it says when the jailer saw that all the prisoners had ran away, right, he ran to them and and and they found him almost killing himself. He was almost committing suicide. You know, and they say to him, man, my guy, chill out, man. We’re good. You know, ah and then he says to him, what should I do? What should I do, you know, to be saved? You know, paraphrasing.

Zenzo Matoga — There was, so two things happened because of radical worship. Chains broke and there was a conviction. There was a conviction for someone who was lost, you know. And I just believe that’s what happens, you know. And I may we be set free from gimmicks because the Jesus we serve is powerful enough to get the job done. If we can just bring him down. He says, if I be lifted up, he says, I will draw men to myself.

Zenzo Matoga — And so don’t believe me. Believe the scripture. If we lift him up and if we praise him, I believe there’s a shaking. There’s a spiritual earthquake that comes to us to our regions and our cities. That’s that’s what people are looking for. I mean look at Boston, yet again the fifth most unchurched city. There are spirits of intellectualism here. There’s spirits of humanism here. Spirits of materialism and secularism, every ism you can ever think about, you know. Things are birthed here and then they go to, I always say that the truth is things are birthed in Boston, you know, and then they’re marketed, they’re marketed in in New York markets them, you know, and then California, you know, makes a movie out of them. But they’re really birthed here.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah. No, it’s true. Yeah, that’s very true.

Zenzo Matoga — And those those those are those are spirits, man, that are holding our cities. And so we you’ve got to pray and the worship, you know, it’s like when Saul would start to have these these tormenting spirits and and David would come and start playing and worship, and these things would be removed. And I think there are things in our cities that need to be removed and when that happens, you know bible says what is this is this, help me out, is this 1 Corinthians 4:4 or 2 Corinthians 4:4 somewhere say it says the god of the god of this age, you know, has has blinded people’s eyes. You know that blindness spiritual blindness has to be removed. And it’s radical worship, it’s a radical worship…

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good

Zenzo Matoga — It’s childlike joy.

Rich Birch — Right.

Zenzo Matoga — You know, the bible says the joy of Lord is my strength. The bible will also says you know for the spirit of heaviness I’ll give you it says the oil of joy every time you see oil that represents an anointing…

Rich Birch — Yep.

Zenzo Matoga — …a yoke breaking power. And so when you lose your joy, you don’t just lose joy. You lose strength and you lose power. You lose this anointing. And so there’s something about this radical joy. You know, when you go to Fenway Park here in Boston, my goodness, there’s joy there.

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

Zenzo Matoga — When you go to ah the Boston Celtics, man, come on. We were champions before Oklahoma OKC took us off, you know. We got the New England Patriots. We had the days of ah Brady here.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Zenzo Matoga — You know, it’s you go there and it’s a religion. It’s worship. It’s joy.

Rich Birch — Right. Yeah.

Zenzo Matoga — It’s a radical joy. they They don’t bash away from being radical. Man, they take their shirts off. They cuss up a storm. They it’s radical. And the church of Jesus Christ is not going to be outdone by the world…

Rich Birch — Right. Yeah, yeah, that’s good.

Zenzo Matoga — …because we invented this joy, man.

Rich Birch — That’s so good.

Zenzo Matoga — We invented this radical behavior, you know, and it can be done well.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good.

Zenzo Matoga — So don’t hold back. Don’t hold back.

Rich Birch — I love that. That’s so good. I love I love your thinking and your leadership there. That’s that’s fantastic. Now, I want to point people towards your book. It’s again, it’s “Impact One, The Epic Prayer That Transforms Friends friends and Family”.

Rich Birch — I do think this could be a helpful resource for people. I think it’d be kind of thing that church leaders could check out and would help them frame this conversation. Where do where do where can people pick up a copy of that if they want to grab a copy or copies of that? Where do we want to send them to to do that?

Zenzo Matoga — Yeah, copies on Amazon, everywhere online.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Zenzo Matoga — Right now it’s just online.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Zenzo Matoga — Yet again, I wrote this church just to teach our church, so it’s out there.

Rich Birch — Yep. That’s wonderful. Yeah. Love it.

Zenzo Matoga — But three times, Rich, churches have reached out to us, and we literally provided books to the whole congregation. And I partnered with the pastor to do to do a series around that and just equip the churches on how to, you know, how to win the loss. And man, I’m telling you, in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, in Providence, Rhode Island, sorry, not Massachusetts, Providence, Rhode Island, man, we helped a church that was averaging about 130 people.

Zenzo Matoga — And just this last Easter, man, they saw over a thousand, you know.

Rich Birch — That’s great.

Zenzo Matoga — And and every single Sunday, they’re now averaging about 300. And we, it was a joy…

Rich Birch — So good.

Zenzo Matoga — …to to go through this book, yeah.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. Well, Zenzo, this has been an incredible conversation, super encouraging today. I’m just so thankful for what you’re doing at Impact and the the impact you’re having in a part of the country, like you said, that is is considered spiritually dry. I love that. I love what, you know, I just want to honor you for, you know, for that. If people want to track with you or with the church, where do we want to send them online just as we wrap up today’s episode?

Zenzo Matoga — Yes, I love the church. I love the church so much. If a pastor wants to reach out, one of my greatest joys is to just stand with other pastors. You know we give God all the glory because what’s happening here, only God could have done that. But many others have helped us along the way, so would gladly do that. And my email address is simple, pastorzenzo at impactpeople.org.

Rich Birch — Love it. Easy.

Zenzo Matoga — Pastorzenzo at impactpeople.org. And our website is the same, very easy, impactpeople.org. That’s it.

Rich Birch — Love it. Well, thanks so much, Zenzo. I appreciate you being here today, sir. Thank you for for serving us and for what you’re doing at Impact.

Zenzo Matoga — Man, to God be of the glory. Thank you so much for what you’re doing. And I’m humbled and honored to to do this with you. Thanks again, Rich.

Rich Birch — Thank you so much.

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of unSeminary! A quick heads-up: Rich experienced some sound issues during the recording; thank you for bearing with us. Fortunately, our guest, Robert Watson, comes through loud and clear, and you won’t want to miss the incredible insights he shares. Thanks for your grace and enjoy the conversation!

Welcome back to the unSeminary podcast. Today we’re joined by Robert Watson, Teaching Pastor at Sun Valley Community Church, one of the fastest-growing churches in the U.S. With over two decades at Sun Valley, Robert has seen thousands take steps toward Jesus and is passionate about helping new believers grow in uncomplicated, practical faith.

Is your church making it easy for new believers to follow Jesus? In this episode, Robert shares how Sun Valley breaks down barriers to discipleship, creates clear next steps, and equips people to live out their faith in real relationships.

To learn more about Sun Valley Community Church, visit sunvalleycc.com. You can find Simply Following Jesus at Amazon, Baker Books, or Barnes & Noble.

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!

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Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: Risepointe

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Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. You’re going to be rewarded. Today is a fantastic conversation around an area that I know that many of our churches wrestle with, and we want to try to give you some practical steps, some kind of resources to move forward today.

Rich Birch — This is one of those episodes you’re going to want action on when we get to the end of it. Excited to have Robert Watson with us. He is a teaching pastor at Sun Valley Community Church. It’s one of the fastest growing churches in the country with, if I’m counting correctly, seven locations in Arizona. He speaks at camps and conferences across the country, trains communicators both locally and internationally. He’s also written a new book that we’re going to get a chance to talk about today. Robert, welcome to the podcast. So glad that you’re here.

Robert Watson — Rich, thank you so much. It’s a huge honor to be here and and join you on the podcast. And yeah, I’m excited about what we’re talking about as well.

Rich Birch — No, this is on this is our honor. Thanks so much for for taking time to be with us. Why don’t you share a little bit about your journey to come to Sun Valley? Maybe tell us a little bit about Sun Valley, kind of what led you to this this point. Talk about your current role. Kind of give us the Robert story.

Robert Watson — Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I felt called into youth ministry when I was a student and my life had kind of blown up and there were people in the church world that kind of opened up their their lives to me, and it made a radical difference. And so I thought, okay, maybe God’s calling me to to be a youth pastor. And I’ll try to do this—you know, some, sometimes pastors can talk a little bit too long when they tell stories—so I’ll try and do this as condensed as I can.

Rich Birch — It’s okay. It’s okay.

Robert Watson — But basically, I was as I was going into college and going to Bible college and thinking about seminary and all of the things, I started thinking about who has you know, just great legacy in ministry. And I looked around kind of the East Valley. I’m from Arizona. And so the East Valley of Arizona, and there were a handful of youth pastors that had a massive impact.

Robert Watson — And I said, okay, what is it that they all have in common? And the answer was absolutely nothing. They were all totally different. Like some were great organizational leaders. Some were really good communicators. Some could just, they knew how to, how to attract people. People they were fun to be around, but they were all so different except for every single one of them had longevity in ministry.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Robert Watson — And so I decided, okay, that’s going to be part of my strategy is I want to, I want to find a church that’s not just a job. I want to find a church that this would be my church community. This would be a place I could invite friends and family and neighbors and not be cringing when they walked in. And so I, again, long story medium, I got a phone call from Sun Valley Community Church and they said, Hey, we know you love where you’re at.

Robert Watson — (I didn’t. They didn’t know that. I was actually going to go into banking.) And they said, would you consider taking on a youth pastor role out at Sun Valley? And so I went to the church service and I walked in and this was 20, over 21 years ago now, almost 22 years ago. And I walked in and I went, there’s just something about this place. I’m going to go to this church, even if I don’t work here.

Rich Birch — That’s cool.

Robert Watson — And I did. I ended up taking that job and I still feel that way about Sun Valley. When you walk into Sun Valley, there’s something about it. God’s anointing is on it. The Holy Spirit is working. People are being loved in Jesus name.

Rich Birch — That’s so good.

Robert Watson — And we see a lot of people meet Jesus in that environment.

Robert Watson — And so I just committed to, yeah those days when you get tired and you’re like, maybe I should do something else, just to stick with it and and to work through conflict with people, get to the other side of it. And I found that’s been so rewarding just to stick with it long term. And so that’s how, so it’s actually my first ever full-time job…

Rich Birch — Oh nice – love it.

Robert Watson — …and I’ve been on staff now going on 22nd year.

Rich Birch — So good. I love that. I love the idea of longevity. You know one of the things that we’ve said in other contexts from like a church growth point of view, one of the telltale signs of a church that gets to multiple thousand people is the senior leadership team has is going into or is in their third decade.

Robert Watson — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Like they they’ve been at this for a long time.

Robert Watson — Yep.

Rich Birch — And so I think we often, you know, we think of those churches that just seem to explode out of the box, but that’s just not normative.

Robert Watson — Yeah.

Rich Birch — And I love what Sun Valley’s done. It’s a great church. If you’re if you’re not tracking with Sun Valley friends, you really should. Doing all kinds of things right. And today we want to talk kind of specifically around as people take steps towards Jesus. Sun Valley, your ministry, is known for people who are are actually coming to faith, which is amazing. It shouldn’t be like a rare thing in churches, but unfortunately it is sometimes. I said that, you didn’t say that.

Rich Birch — So we want to talk through some of that today. Every church leader wants to see people take meaningful steps in following Jesus. From your experience, what are some common barriers that but new believers, people who are just starting to follow Jesus face when they’re starting out in their faith.

Robert Watson — Yeah, there’s there’s this secret language in the church world that we don’t realize we pick up. If you’ve grown up around church, there’s so many things, and we use acronyms, we use letters, we’ll refer to things like, oh, VBS or whatever. And people are like, what in the world are they talking about?

Robert Watson — Even when we open up the Bible, we’re like, what are the big numbers and what are the little numbers? Like, we we forget if you grew up around church, which a lot of people that are in church ministry, they they grew up around it or they’re somewhat familiar with it. We don’t realize how foreign some of the language and the thought process when we start singing songs about the blood and people are like, what are we…

Rich Birch — What are you talking about?

Robert Watson — What is this place? Why are we singing? You know? And so one of the things that that we’ve tried to be intentional about, of making it really easy to understand what we’re talking about. Like we’re still going to open up the Bible, but we’ll explain, hey, the big numbers, those are chapters. The little numbers, those are verses.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Robert Watson — And these are just tools to help us find different things in the Bible, because the Bible is actually a collection of books. Like we we do the same kind of introduction anytime we talk about Old Testament, New Testament. What is the Old Testament? What is the New Testament? And so we’ve found that by giving kind of those easy steps to understanding, one, it doesn’t make our church dumber.

Rich Birch — Right.

Robert Watson — Like people aren’t, you know, that grew up around church or people that have their their doctorates, they’re not sitting back going, I can’t believe they’re explaining this. We’re creating a culture where they know they can bring their non-Christian friend and they’re not going to feel alienated. They’re going to understand. But we’re going to get into what does the Bible actually say? What is the meat of it? But we’re going to do it in a way that we can take everybody on that journey with us.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. I yeah, I think sometimes there’s this false dichotomy in churches where it’s like on one side are like the like trivia driven churches where it’s like they think like, hey, if we just get people understanding all kinds of trivia about the Bible, that’s somehow the goal. And that’s not the goal. That’s the goal is is discipleship, actually seeing people grow. And so we’ve got to take people from where they are to where we want them to be.

Robert Watson — That’s right.

Rich Birch — Let’s double click on that. What are some other ways you’ve seen kind of this over complexity, this kind of like our way of making things more complex than they should be as it relates to kind of um following Jesus that we might be not aware of – there’s like a forest for the trees thing, if we’ve grown up in the church.

Robert Watson — Yeah, I think because a lot of times the voices that we listen to, first of all, are our own. And so if I’m a pastor and I’m putting together a sermon and I’ve done this sermon before and I’ve done you know I’ve done something on this passage before, I get excited about discovering new things when I when I’m preparing a message.

Robert Watson — I get excited about a new book that I just read. Or I get excited about this new archaeological discovery. And we found this manuscript here and it actually matches that. So those are things that I get fired up about. And I’m like, oh, man, this would be great fodder for this message coming up this this next weekend. Or this would be great content. And instead of listening to those, or my friends that are you know church people or other pastors, we get excited about things that sometimes are confusing.

Rich Birch — Right.

Robert Watson — And it’s a new it’s a new conversation that started in the academia world, and it’s things we want to engage in. It’s just not helpful, especially for the person that doesn’t have that framework.

Robert Watson — And so for me, I think one of the reasons why we do make things a little overly complex is because we’re just excited about a new thought, even though we’ve been growing in our understanding of the Bible for decades. And it’s been layer by layer. We’ve been building kind of this foundation of our understanding. We have to remember, most 99.9% of the people who are, you know, in church on a weekend, they don’t have that same background and foundation.

Robert Watson — And so it’s, it’s important once again to go, okay, what is actually practical here and what is helpful? And I’m all for Bible studies. So don’t, don’t hear that I’m, I’m not a fan of…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Robert Watson — …you know, go read N.T. Wright, go study your, you know, do your commentary stuff and all of that. I’m, I love doing that. I get excited about that because I think God’s word is incredible and it’s full of so many deep truths, but sometimes the deepest truths are the obvious ones that we should do something that are very practical, that are very simple. Those to me are the deepest things. The other stuff is just interesting. It’s fun. It’s it’s exciting.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Robert Watson — And one of the terms, we have a a mentor, Chad, who’s our lead pastor. He and I have been working together. He got hired on just two months after I did. So we’ve been in this long run together. And we have a mentor who’s now a retired older gentleman. And he always says, sometimes when it comes to church people in the church, you got to remember every message, give the dog a bone.

Robert Watson — And what he what do he means by that is is people who’ve been around it for a while, they want something interesting, thoughtful to chew on. But once you give that to them and they can gnaw on that bone for a while, you’re good. Like you can actually now go back to the simple message and and the preaching.

Robert Watson — And so we try to do that when we whenever we present, that there’s something that the church person goes, I never thought of it that way, or I never heard it explained quite that clearly or from that angle, or that was a new thought on that that old idea. And and and we just make it really practical from there.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. ah You had a a friend, a mentor of mine who said, you got to put the cookies on the bottom shelf, like make the main thing the main thing.

Robert Watson — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Like, how do we ensure that we don’t make things more complex than they need to be? And then also there’s there’s a profound thought there, friends. It applies to so many areas of leadership that I don’t want you to miss, which is we’re not the target for what we’re working with as a leader in all areas, you are, you’re leading. And so you’re in a different place. And so it’s not about impressing you or impressing, you know, your friends who are at the same spot. You’ve got to think about where are people at? You know, that’s why they’re called sheep. We have to lead them. You know, we’re called to be shepherds to move them from where they are to a more desired future.

Rich Birch — Well, at Sun Valley, ah let’s double click on this, kind of keep digging into this idea. You know, you see thousands of people come to faith every year and and we want to learn from that. What have you learned about helping people move from that initial decision? So let’s say they’ve decided to say, hey, I want to follow Jesus into a growing active relationship with Jesus. We we want to move people from that kind of like, hey, I feel something. I had this initial experience into an active growing relationship. What are you doing to to help see that happen?

Robert Watson — Yeah, that’s a great question. So there’s there’s a few things that we see Jesus do in his his ministry, and and I want to cover them real quickly because I do think it is important. If you want to know how to help people who say yes to Jesus, you got to have a line in the sand moment where you invite them to say yes to following Jesus.

Robert Watson — And so if you look at if you look at like John and you look at the ministry of Jesus, it kind of had four parts to it. So there was come and see, which is woman at the well. Jesus has this interaction. She goes to the whole village and says, hey, come and see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could it be this is this is the Messiah? Come and see.

Robert Watson — Follow me. There are line in the sand moments where Jesus gives a hard teaching and he says, are you in or are you out? So he draws in a crowd and and then there’s a line in the sand. Are you following me? Are you just here because I multiplied fish and loaves and that that was impressive and you guys followed me around Galilee and you want to see it again?

Robert Watson — So “come and see” and “follow me”. Those are things that we can do up front on stage. That’s kind of one on many. But then there’s there’s “be with me” and “remain in me” are kind of the the next stages.

Robert Watson — And those things only happen in the context of conversation and close up and community. And so at best as a upfront communicator, the the best that I can do is you know, the big crowd moments, the come and see, and then a line in the sand, follow me. But I do think the more we invite people to say yes to following Jesus, the more people we will see say yes to following Jesus.

Rich Birch — For sure.

Robert Watson — I think sometimes we’re just waiting for that to happen organically. And it’s okay on a big weekend when we have like coming up soon, we’re going to have a big weekend with a lot of guests because we’re back to school in Arizona and it’s one of our highest attended weekends of the year. And so we’re going to do a line in the sand moment because people invite friends…

Rich Birch — Right.

Robert Watson — …we do some fun stuff and we’ll go, Hey, this is what Jesus did for you. And if you want to put your trust in him, he’s already said yes to you. If you’d be willing to say yes to his invitation, he’ll transform your life. And here’s how he does that and invite them to say yes. And we’ll have, you know, hundreds of people go, I’m in.

That’s good.

Robert Watson — And then we do baptisms five times a year, which is, again, this is now a public profession of that that inward decision. And from there, our goal is if we can get people into real relationship and then also give them real responsibility.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Robert Watson — Because if if they have real relationship, meaning there’s somebody who knows their name, there’s somebody who knows when they’re there, when they’re not there, they know what’s going on in their world. They know what’s most important to them that week because they got this big thing going on. It’s impossible to do that from stage one on many. And so that’s why we push things like small groups. We push things like serving because it’s one thing to go, okay, I’m going to show up. But if you say, hey can you, we’re doing small group at my house. Can you bring the soda or whatever? And, and I’m, now I have responsibility.

Robert Watson — Now, if I don’t show up, like the group’s not going to have any Dr. Pepper, like I can’t do that to them.

Rich Birch — Right.

Robert Watson — And so there’s any time we can get people into that, that relationship and responsibility, now they’re into kind of the life of the church.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Robert Watson — And the goal of “remain in me” is that as they, as they start serving others, they start to experience more of Jesus, no longer just in their head of like, okay, I’m getting knowledge. Now I’m practically serving others.

Robert Watson — And if you think about in your own story, Rich, and if I think about my own story, one of the times we’ve grown the most in our relationship with Jesus is when we really started using the gifts that he’s given us to serve other people.

Rich Birch — Yeah, so true. Yep.

Robert Watson — That’s Jesus, when he washes the disciples’ feet, he doesn’t say, I’ve given you a a really good teaching. You should go teach other people. He goes, I set you an example. Go do this, and you’ll be blessed if you do it. And he’s he’s telling us there’s something about serving others that’s kind of that that deeper level of understanding who Jesus is, and that’s his invitation to us.

Rich Birch — Yes. Yep. yeah I love that. This is the thing we’ve seen. So I’ve seen in multiple contexts where on the like, I would say and maybe on the like church assimilation side, which is I realize is kind of connected to what we’re talking about, but it’s it like slightly different where, but it’s, it’s a related, it rhymes, that I’ve really seen I would say post COVID, like in the last five years, churches shift to a lot more, like we always want people into teams and You know, and or on, you know, on groups or sorry, on teams and in groups, you want to see them do both of those things.

Rich Birch — But there has been, I would say, a stronger emphasis ah around getting people plugged into helping somehow. That there’s been like, hey, there’s a there’s an inherent understanding that people need to be a part of the mission. That’s actually a part of what discipleship is like. What is that?

Robert Watson — Yeah.

Rich Birch — I know this is a little bit off from what we said we were going talk about, but tell me a little bit more what that looks like at Sun Valley. Because I think that is, I think this is definitely a trend we have seen. I’ve seen it echo in other other contexts. What’s that look like for you guys? As someone takes a step toward Jesus, you’re trying to say, hey, we want to help you actually plug in and and get connected, not just a learning phase, but like a doing phase as well. What’s that look like?

Robert Watson — Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think a lot of times, especially you get a bunch of us executives together and we want a nice linear path, right? We want to we want to map it all out.

Rich Birch — Right.

Robert Watson — It’s going to look really good on a whiteboard.

Rich Birch — It’s going to be great on the whiteboard. Exactly.

Robert Watson — Yep. They’re going to go from here to here to here.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Robert Watson — That’s just not how humanity works. People are messy.

Rich Birch — That’s true.

Robert Watson — People are in process. And so there needs to be, I think, a a willingness and an openness to go, okay, it depends on the person…

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

Robert Watson — …and and what is best for this individual might not be that they follow this exact assimilation track. And so I think the reason why probably you’re noticing and sensing more of an emphasis on plugging people into serving, because the things that you get out of like a small group or some churches, they’ll do, you know, more of the like Sunday school model or whatever.

Robert Watson — When you plug somebody into serving, you kind of get all the good things that come from being in a group thrown into that. So if you’re, if you have a team, that’s a solid team, you have your coaches, your mentors on that team. Usually you’re teaching some kind of content and to kind of go back to even the premise of this conversation, the deep truths of Scripture, we’re teaching in our elementary school.

Rich Birch — Right.

Robert Watson — We’re teaching these things in our with our students.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Robert Watson — The deep things of of Scripture, they’re accessible to everybody. And so even if you’re not in this context where it’s geared directly towards you, the content’s there, the relationship’s there. You have real responsibility. Kids are asking you questions.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Robert Watson — And you’re having your leader huddle before the service starts or you’re hanging out afterwards.

Robert Watson — I was just on a mission trip with 43. It was a high school mission trip. And me and the other leaders on that trip, man, we built great connections. We’re going to one of, they live far away. We’re going to their house next Sunday with our family because we just built these connections serving students together.

Robert Watson — And I do think there’s a lot of that that naturally happens. I think in some people’s minds, though, they’re like, I’m not ready to serve yet. But for some, that’s before they ever go sit in somebody’s house and like knock on the door of somebody’s house…

Rich Birch — Yes.

…and go sit in the living room and talk about their feelings.

Rich Birch — Right.

Robert Watson — I invited—this is a funny story—I invited my next door neighbors in our previous house. They had just given their lives to Jesus. They came to Sun Valley, said yes to following Jesus. We had baptized them. And I was like, hey, we do Bible study at my house. We do the small group, you should come over. And they walked in and they saw a circle of chairs. And I saw them look at this circle of chairs like, what kind of a cult am I walking into right now?

Rich Birch — That’s true.

Robert Watson — And everybody’s sitting down in these chairs and nobody, there’s no alcohol. So for my, so I say all of this for my neighbors, they’re like, who does this? Like they, they understood a party.

Rich Birch — Right, right.

Robert Watson — They knew that you hang out at parties. People have drinks, you bring them food. It’s a potluck. Sitting in a circle in a living room talking about your feelings was very scary for my neighbors.

Rich Birch — Right.

Robert Watson — But then when I was like, Hey, do you guys want to, we go a hour early before service and we we serve. They’re like, yeah, we’re in. And they were more than willing to jump in and serve.

Rich Birch — Right.

Robert Watson — For them, that felt like that is the right next step for them.

Rich Birch — Right.

Robert Watson — And so I was just reminded, oh yeah, I’m so used to this. For the rest of the world, sometimes this looks a little weird what we do and we just it’s normal.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

Robert Watson — Yeah.

Rich Birch — That’s good. That’s a good insight for sure. And, and yeah, there’s something about asking people, they can kind of picture what the serving thing looks like. They can picture, Hey, this is what those first steps look like, but, but we don’t have a lot of kind of dynamic equivalents of the, like you say, sit in a circle and, it goes in all kinds of crazy directions.

Robert Watson — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Well, you’ve written a book. I want to make sure people pick up copies.

Robert Watson — Yeah.

Rich Birch — My bias is just right out there, friends. I think you should be buying copies of these with your team and maybe even as a resource as a church. It’s called “Simply Following Jesus: Practices for Living Out an Uncomplicated Faith”. This a huge deal. What led you? What was the kind of spark that led you to write this book?

Robert Watson — Yeah. So because of the the context of our church and the number of individuals that that we’ve seen say yes to following Jesus and just in massive numbers, and it’s overwhelming for them because they don’t know, okay, what do you do first? Where do you start? How do how do you really get this thing? Like I’m all in, they hear the gospel, they’re excited about following Jesus, and they’re just kind of: now what? And, and, and so to go, well, you know, we do this class couple times a year, you know, you can join us for that.

Robert Watson — And and so we just decided, what if we gave them a resource that really took, cause we’ll talk about all the things that are in, in the book that I wrote. We’ll talk about that over the course of a couple of years. Like what if we took really the foundational pieces, we put it together in one resource and we gave it just as a gift to people.

Robert Watson — And so we’ve started now, we, we do baptisms five times a year. And now whenever somebody gets baptized, if they’re a high schooler or an adult, we give them a copy of this book.

Rich Birch — So good.

Robert Watson — And it really lays out, it starts with the gospel, because I think where a lot of people are confused, and this is Christians and non-Christians, is understanding the gospel.

Rich Birch — Right.

Robert Watson — Is understanding that we are this is not a works salvation. We’re not trying to earn something. We’re not trying to earn back something, that this is a gift from God. And so really understanding the foundation of the gospel and and that it is because God loves us that he’s invited us into this relationship. It’s not if we do these things, then he will love us. No, God loves you no matter who you are, no matter what you’ve done, no matter what’s been done to you. So it really starts with kind of laying that foundation.

Robert Watson — And I think it’s important if you grew up in church like I did, you know, you have to keep coming back to the gospel again and again and be reminded of it again and again.

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s true. It’s true.

Robert Watson — And so really wanted to start with that foundation, understanding who is Jesus, the nature of God’s love for us. So that’s kind of the the beginning, which is a little bit theological. But I try to make it a simple as as possible. And I’m stealing that idea from Jesus who said, hey, all the law, all the prophets, let me take the whole Jewish scriptures and let me sum sum it up for you.

Rich Birch — Right.

Robert Watson — It’s love the Lord your God with all your heart heart, soul, mind and strength. Love your neighbor as yourself. And when Jesus does that, that to me is kind of the the model, the example. Okay, can we take these big truths that, I mean, you and I, we could get in a room and we could unpack verse by verse and we would love it. And it would be brilliant and beautiful and wonderful. And Jesus goes, okay, but also let me just sum it up and simplify it for you.

Rich Birch — Right, right.

Robert Watson — So that’s, that’s kind of that first part. So simple foundation. And looking at what are the habits that Jesus modeled and that Jesus taught. Because if you look at the early church, you had a lot of people that that were illiterate. You had a lot of people that they didn’t understand all the Jewish scriptures and everything, but they understood the example that Jesus set and that his disciples are going, here’s what Jesus did. Follow me as I follow Jesus. This is what this looks like practically.

Robert Watson — And there are some habits. There are things that Jesus expects us to do, like spending time with him in prayer, you know spending time in relationship with others. And then the third part of the book is just simple relationships.

Rich Birch — Right.

Robert Watson — It’s how do you take this foundation of the gospel, these habits that Jesus modeled, and apply it into your relationships? Because at the end of the day, the Bible, it’s it’s a relational book. It’s a book about how to have right relationship with God and right relationship with the people around us, which again, to back to where Jesus says, all the law, all the prophets hang on these two commands.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Robert Watson — And the and the first is like the second, it’s love God, love people.

Rich Birch — Love it. Well, I want to dive into that a little bit, but but let me give a little hearty endorsement. I really do think that this resource could be, I think is is fitting in a great spot when I was going through it, I thought the same thing that that you said there, man, this would be so fantastic for people that are getting baptized, for people that are taking that first step. Maybe someone’s you know, just had some sort of encounter at something like Alpha and they’re like, hey, they’re looking for something next. Like, what is that? Is that resource?

Rich Birch — But I want double clip click on the simple relationships part. So reflecting on my own early discipleship experience when I first became a Christian, I feel like there was that tension of like, the gospel is a free gift and you don’t need to do anything, earn anything. And then immediately the discipleship went into, and then here are things you should do.

Robert Watson — yeah

Rich Birch — Here are, do this, read that, all that. And you don’t handle it like that in the habit section at all. I love the way you frame it, but but I think early discipleship can kind of land in that way. Like it’s a free gift. Now here’s 10 things you’ve got to do.

Robert Watson — That’s right. Yeah.

Rich Birch — This relationship part I found as an interesting nuance. Unpack that a little bit more.

Robert Watson — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Why was that in there as a, or why do you see that as a critical piece, ah kind of an an an initial conversation someone should be having around their faith?

Robert Watson — Yeah, I think because there are there are things that are disciplines in following Jesus, but they’re not disciplines in the sense of like, oh, I got to do this difficult thing because it’s the secret handshake that gets me in, you know.

Rich Birch — Right. Yes.

Robert Watson — Or it’s the I’m climbing this proverbial mountain. They’re just new ways to experience God’s grace.

Rich Birch — Right. That’s good.

Robert Watson — And so when there’s habits, the habits are actually invitations. It’s not you you ought to and you should, and and we feel like we’re just guilted into, I need to read my Bible more. I need to pray more. These are open invitations that God has provided these ways for us to experience His grace each and every day.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Robert Watson — And it’d be transformed by His grace each and every day. And so even just that that little different way of looking at it. It’s an invitation and it’s not one that God’s forcing upon you. It’s open to you. It’s available to you. And what, what I’ve experienced when I’ve stepped into that invitation. it’s scary in my mind, but it’s so rewarding in actual practice.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Robert Watson — Like it’s usually just in my head space. I’m like, oh man, I’m gonna read my Bible every day. Now I genuinely, and I’ve been reading my Bible for a long time. I genuinely enjoy starting off my day. I have I use the Bible app now because I have a streak counter and I’m a little bit competitive. And so I can be like, oh man, I’m on this many days in a row.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Robert Watson — And I use that and I and I just go, okay, Holy Spirit, what do you wanna speak to me this morning? And I’ll start reading through ah a passage. Sometimes I’ll get through a whole chapter, sometimes just a section. And I walk away and it’s like, it’s recalibrated my day.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

Robert Watson — And and my day now is it’s pointed in a right direction. I’ve experienced God’s grace. Sometimes I get a little whisper from the Holy Spirit. Sometimes I’m just groggy and I did it and I move on, but I’m experiencing God’s grace in new ways by doing that.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Robert Watson — And so that’s, I think that’s the important thing for any new believer to understand. God is not trying to like force you. He doesn’t want to rob you. He actually comes to to give. He comes to to share in his grace, to share in his love. And anytime he asks us to do something, it’s ultimately for our good. And it’s an invitation, not a, hey, I’m going to make you do this thing because now you you obey every every word that I say. No, it’s an invitation to to experience his grace in new ways.

Rich Birch — That’s good. That’s good. This is a fantastic resource. And have you seen, you know, any impact as, it’s been used at Sun Valley or maybe in some other context, maybe a story or two of like, you know, how it’s been particularly effective or been, you know, a tool in the hands of somebody who’s taken some next steps, some early steps towards Jesus.

Robert Watson — Yeah, it’s, it’s always, it’s always fascinating to me. I just, as a, as an author, as a writer, I never know, like, hey, is this good? Is this helpful?

Rich Birch — Right. That’s true. Yes.

Robert Watson — Is this you know is this going to is this going to resonate with somebody? I don’t know.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Robert Watson — And I’m always amazed at how God has has used these resources in in different ways. This one in particular. So the book’s only been out for a couple months now. And I there was an older gentleman who actually…he was being forced into retirement. And so his job, his time, his whole company was kind of disbanding and he was being forced into early retirement, but he was going to throw a retirement party for all his fellow employees. And this is not, these these employees are far from Jesus. And he goes, Hey, I read your book. And as kind of my last parting gift, I want to give it as a resource. You know, can I come by with a box of these books and you sign it?

Robert Watson — And so at his retirement party, he gave, you know how like at kids’ birthday parties, they get the little bag of candy when they leave, they get the little door prize.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Robert Watson — He had my book there. And so I just wrote little notes about how how much God loves these individuals and prayed over them. And he handed them out as kind of a, hey, I would love for you to have what I have. And it’s this relationship with Jesus. And this this book will actually help you understand what it is. And and so he gave that out. I thought, man, what a cool evangelism tool.

Robert Watson — And for this person, you know, and his kind of last is probably the last time these people all be in a room together. And he thought, hey, this is a great opportunity to maybe share the gospel with with my coworkers one last time.

Rich Birch — That’s cool. That’s so cool. I love that. Well, if there’s a pastor that’s listening in that that wants to better serve people who are taking early steps, outside of buying copies of your book, because I want them to do that. But outside of that, what’s one thing you know you could encourage them to take kind of an early step they could take, maybe even the next month, to try to help those people who are taking early steps in their relationship with Jesus? What’s one kind of practical advice you give to them?

Robert Watson — Yeah, I do think because so much of following Jesus has lived out in the context of relationships, what I what I think it’s important for all churches, especially large churches, and I know a lot of the people who listen on your podcast here, they’re churches over a thousand. It’s easy for people to become numbers in all of that.

Robert Watson — And the reminder that every number has a name, every name has a story, every story matters to God. The the more we can get those stories, one, and think in front of our staff to remind our our staff, hey, these are real people. These are people that you know. These are people that you’ve been in conversation with. The more we can get those names, those stories in front of our staff.

Robert Watson — And I would just say for those new believers, especially when somebody says yes to Jesus, Don’t just hope that they kind of naturally assimilate. Have some way that you pursue those individuals.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Robert Watson — Let them know that they’re seen. Let them know that they’re known. Go out of your way because for some people, it’s going to take several times of saying, hey, we should grab coffee. Hey, we should hang out.

Rich Birch — Right.

Robert Watson — Let me hear your story before they say yes to that. I think those are people worth pursuing. And I think, too, if you look at you know the parable that Jesus gave, when that seed’s planted, there’s a lot of things. That soil can be rocky, can be thorny. The enemy can come snatch that away. I think it’s a fragile time in those early stages of a new believer that if ever there’s a time for us to go out of our way to relationally connect and pursue, that that is the time to do it.

Rich Birch — Yeah. Love that. I yeah when I first became a christian when i was a student there was a guy youth leader in my church that he like jumped on it, and which was amazing and like we met every week for a year. Which when I look back on that this guy, Rick Peet, incredible leader in my life.

Rich Birch — You know, I look back on that man, the impact that that had on me because he took the he took the kind of first step there. He was the first mover in that relationship. Hey, let’s let’s get together. Let’s talk about it. that’s that’s That’s fantastic.

Robert Watson — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Well, we want to make sure people pick up copies of your book. Again, it’s “Simply Following Jesus: Practices for Living Out an Uncomplicated Faith”. I’m assuming people can get it at Amazon. That’s usually where good books are sold.

Robert Watson — Yep.

Rich Birch — It’s always a funny question to ask.

Robert Watson — Amazon, Baker Books.

Rich Birch — Where do people get books? You know, that kind of thing.

Robert Watson — Yeah. Yeah.

Rich Birch — And where else do we want to send them?

Robert Watson — All those places, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Baker Books – usually they run some kind of a discount off their website. That’s the book publisher. And so usually they have some good deals run in there as well.

Rich Birch — Great. Well, just as we wrap up today, any kind of final parting words you’d have for people that are listening in today?

Robert Watson — I would, oh man, I would just say enjoy the journey. I think there’s so much…

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Robert Watson — …joy that comes from following Jesus. Like when I think about all the things I could be involved in, in my life and all of that, when I get to hear somebody taking, not, not just you know intellectually, I’ve got this new information and I’m believing it, but they take something and apply it.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Robert Watson — And they experience the transformation and they experience a strengthening of their relationships. Jesus said that we would be known by the quality of our relationships, our loved one for another is how he he says it. And so when I see people that are new in faith experiencing forgiveness for the first time, or experiencing the the gift of listening to others and asking good, thoughtful questions and and something starts to come alive in them, I just, as a pastor, what more can you ask for than than seeing and life change?

Robert Watson — And so the the relational life change, being around that, like constantly celebrating those stories, sharing those stories, being excited about that, I find no greater joy than to see people genuinely following Jesus.

Rich Birch — That’s good

Robert Watson — And ah so I don’t know if that is the right closing thought, but yeah.

Rich Birch — No, it’s wonderful. It’s great. It’s good.

Robert Watson — Rich, thank you so much.

Rich Birch — Well, I appreciate being on the podcast today. Where can we send people if they want to track with you or track with the church online?

Robert Watson — Yeah. So Sun Valley Community Church is the name of our church. We’re in Arizona, sunvalleycc.com. And then we’re on you know Instagram and all of that. And I think mine is just robertsvcc is my Instagram. But yeah, you can you can look up us look us up online. And if there’s  anything that anybody has questions about, you can reach out to me. You can find me through the the website, whatever, and I’d be I’d be happy to follow up with you.

Rich Birch — That’s great. Thanks so much. Thanks for being on the podcast today.

Robert Watson — Thanks, Rich.
 

In this special roundup episode of the unSeminary podcast, we highlight key insights from three previously recorded interviews focused on strengthening church staff teams. In celebration of the Summer 2025 issue of Executive Pastor Magazine, this curated compilation revisits rich conversations with leadership experts Dr. Ryan Hartwig and Dr. Warren Bird, executive pastor Ken McAnulty of Arise Church, and Diana Rush from Eastside Church. Each segment dives into unique aspects of staff development—from shared leadership and onboarding strategies to the art of leading from the middle in multisite churches.

Healthy Leadership Teams: The Power of Shared Leadership [Listen to the full episode]
With Dr. Ryan Hartwig & Dr. Warren Bird

Onboarding That Sets the Pace for Staff Success [Listen to the full episode]
With Ken McAnulty, Executive Pastor at Arise Church

Leading from the Middle: Managing Up, Down, and Inward [Listen to the full episode]
With Diana Rush, Senior Director of Build Community at Eastside Christian Church

This episode is a powerful reminder that great teams don’t happen by accident. Whether it’s building collaborative leadership structures, creating intentional onboarding experiences, or navigating the tensions of middle management, strong staff culture is essential for sustained church growth. Each segment provides actionable takeaways and fresh inspiration for executive pastors and church leaders who want to lead better teams and foster healthier staff environments.

Download the free Executive Pastor Magazine Summer 2025 issue at unSeminary.com.

There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, but you chose unSeminary, and I’m grateful for that. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it by using the social media buttons you see at the left hand side of this page. Also, kindly consider taking the 60-seconds it takes to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, they’re extremely helpful when it comes to the ranking of the show and you can bet that I read every single one of them personally!

Lastly, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, to get automatic updates every time a new episode goes live!

Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: Portable Church

Your church is doing really well right now, and your leadership team is looking for solutions to keep momentum going! It could be time to start a new location. Maybe you have hesitated in the past few years, but you know it’s time to step out in faith again and launch that next location. Portable Church has assembled a bundle of resources to help you leverage your growing momentum into a new location by sending a part of your congregation back to their neighborhood on Mission. This bundle of resources will give you a step-by-step plan to launch that new or next location, and a 5 minute readiness tool that will help you know your church is ready to do it!

Click here to watch the free webinar “Launch a New Location in 150 Days or Less” and grab the bundle of resources for your church!

Rich Birch — Yeah, hey friends, happy Thursday. Welcome to the unSeminary podcast. Super pumped that you are tuned in.

Rich Birch — Listen, today we are celebrating the release of Executive Pastor Magazine’s Summer 2025 edition. It’s completely free. Just drop by unseminary.com and pick up copies of it. This season’s edition is all about staff. It’s all about helping you have a more productive team. We’ve got great articles in there by Paul Alexander, Todd Rhodes, Dan Reiland, Gavin Adams, and Dave Miller. You’re not going to want to miss it. Incredible resource and it’s completely free. Just drop by and pick it up.

Rich Birch — But today on the episode, what we’re doing is we’re pulling out three, what I like to call the heart of the episode, from the vault that deal with this same topic. In this first segment, you’re gonna hear from Ryan Hartwig, Dr. Ryan Hartwig and Dr. Warren Bird. They’re co-authors of a book called Teams That Thrive.

Rich Birch — And 10 years ago, May 2015, we had them on the podcast and they unpack what makes healthy senior leadership teams tick and why shared leadership is both biblical and deeply practical. You’ll also hear some behind the scenes stories, including frankly a candid moment from my own leadership at Liquid Church. If you’re navigating leadership tension or wondering how to build a stronger team culture, this part is gold. Stay tuned for this. This is Ryan Hartwig and Warren Bird from an episode about 10 years ago on Teams That Thrive.

Rich Birch — Stay tuned for this. And we’ve got two more great segments coming up…

Ryan Hartwig — What do we find? Oh boy, there’s so many things we find. Really, we identified five disciplines of collaborative church leadership.

Ryan Hartwig — And I can kind of get into those five disciplines. But probably before that, probably if we could sum all that up, what we realized is that Teams That Thrive are convinced that shared leadership is a biblical way to lead and is a preferable way to lead. It was kind of the first thing.

Ryan Hartwig — There was a strong conviction, like we’ve got to figure out how to do this thing well. So that was the first piece. Then the second piece was that they were willing to do the fundamental disciplines day in and day out to enable their team to thrive.

Ryan Hartwig — I mean, quite honestly, a lot of the stuff we talk about in the book, I don’t know that it’s incredibly groundbreaking. It’s like, oh wow, I’ve never even heard that before. I mean, a lot of the things I think, generally, we’ve heard some of these things at least before.

Ryan Hartwig — But really, these teams were the ones that said, okay, we’re gonna actually run our meetings well. We’re gonna actually really think through who’s going to serve on these teams. We’re gonna really make sure that leadership tasks and team are actually shared. And not just kind of have these things as platitudes, but we’re gonna discipline ourselves to do these things all of the time.

Rich Birch — Very cool. Well, we had a surprise guest join us on the podcast. If you’re watching the video, you see Warren Bird jumped in. Warren, the co-author of Teams That Thrive also is joining us today. Warren, welcome to the show.

Warren Bird — Thanks! Ryan, I love what you’re saying. I can’t wait to read that book.

Rich Birch — No, that’s fantastic. So Warren, just to kind of bring you up to speed, we kind of talked a bit about the research process that went on, which you, I’m sure, had a part to do with. And then we’re just kind of getting into a little bit of what are some of those insights, some of those key insights that came out.

Rich Birch — For you, Warren, as you talked with and interviewed so many churches, 140 some odd churches that ended up giving all the information, what were some of those insights that jumped through to you as patterns as you interacted with different churches?

Warren Bird — Well, affirming everything that Ryan said, I just became convinced that everybody wants to do team, but they don’t know how to do it well. And they don’t even know, are we doing it well? They don’t even know.

Warren Bird — We started the book with like these myths that people think, well, I guess a team means that we all advise the pastor and then the pastor makes the decisions and we’re working as a team. No, you’re not! You’re losing huge potential if that’s how you approach the idea of team.

Warren Bird — And in today’s fluidity of who’s on the team, who’s not, we even, in our survey, we were amazed at how many churches the members of a team disagreed with who all was on their team. So it was quite a stretch.

Rich Birch — That’s funny. Now, so playing a little bit of the devil’s advocate here. So team leadership, that sounds like a—I’m playing devil’s advocate here. I don’t actually believe what I’m about to say—But team leadership, that sounds like some sort of Namby Pamby, wow, woohoo deal. Isn’t it, doesn’t God give the vision to a person and then we’re all just supposed to march in behind that person, Ryan? Isn’t that, aren’t that, isn’t that the evidence of like a great thriving church?

Ryan Hartwig — Well, sure. I mean, we see that, yeah, certainly God gives the vision to people, but he doesn’t give all of the vision to only one person. The beauty of a leadership team is that, is recognizing that God speaks to everyone.

Ryan Hartwig — And so why would we just limit ourselves to only hearing God speaking to one individual and not to many? If we believe that the Spirit lives inside of us, right, then he can speak to all of us. And so the beauty, I think, of the team is being able to come together and saying, okay, what is it that God is saying to us?

Ryan Hartwig — How can we use different perspectives, the different expertise, the different experiences that we have, and ultimately be able to make better decisions and implement greater ministry throughout the church by sharing leadership together. So that’s really the idea there. I mean, we’re not suggesting that a leadership team precludes someone from providing strong leadership.

Ryan Hartwig — In fact, a lot of the teams that we see, there is a strong leader. That’s okay, there’s nothing wrong with having a strong leader. But not so strong that that leader precludes others from also being able to fully contribute the things that God has put into them.

Rich Birch — Interesting. Now, Warren, you know, you’ve been studying kind of leadership and looking at leadership over a number of years. Is there anything in this, what you found here, that you feel like is a kind of a shift, either culturally or kind of generationally? Are you seeing any differences on that front?

Warren Bird — Yeah, the whole idea of leadership development, this is just one more piece of it. On your team, you don’t hire pre-trained people who’ve all got it together. It’s a team growing together, getting better together, making better decisions with a better process and building into each other.

Warren Bird — So in a way, this models what you hope the whole rest of the church will be all about, that we’re forever taking people, to use a Willow Creek expression, from total pagan to a dedicated missionary. And that being part of a team is different steps on that journey.

Rich Birch — Interesting. Well, when we had the privilege, I had mentioned this earlier, we had the privilege when you were in the process of writing this book to sit down and spend some time. And it was actually great. I loved the coaching that you both provided to our team.

Rich Birch — And actually, to this day, one of the things that Ryan said, kind of a challenge to us as a lead team, said, you need to not answer all the questions. You need to allow some of the questions to hang. And you need to create space for people to maybe deliberately allow a few things to kind of hang out there, create some space, so that your leaders who are around you will rise up and help and obviously push the mission forward. Which actually that has continued to shape our thinking over the last couple of years. So that’s, and that was just one kind of piece of an overall conversation, which I really appreciated.

Rich Birch — Tell us about some of the other churches that you ended up highlighting throughout the book. Is there any others that stick out for you, Ryan?

Warren Bird — Well, before Ryan answers, let me just brag on you guys at Liquid Church. That was so, you were in the survey and then we kind of picked the top 10% of churches and tried to visit different ones. And that was you.

Warren Bird — And I have to say, I’ve sat in a lot of church senior leadership team meetings and yours was distinctly different in the engagement level, in the buy-in, in the use of different people’s talents, in the humility that you expressed, in the esprit de corps. So I just wanna cheer that that was a great day for us too, to be able to learn from you. And you’re really different from a lot of churches that really struggle.

Warren Bird — And I say all that to say, it can be different. Churches can incrementally come to that kind of thing where team members look forward to interacting with each other and taking another step in their journey of leading God’s church right.

Ryan Hartwig — Yeah, yeah, two quick thoughts there. And I don’t remember if we actually named these churches in the book or not, so I won’t use their names. But two, I think, two kind of senior pastor profiles a little bit in terms of how they have tried to build these teams.

Ryan Hartwig — One of the pastors realized that his predecessor was this very, very organized, organized guy who would have, in any sort of an event, would kind of pull out the color-coded spreadsheets and assign everyone a task and so on. Everyone would just kind of march out those orders. And as he took over the church, he really realized that was preventing, even though the team was able to kind of be cohesive in the sense of marching out orders, it was really preventing all the team members from offering their best to the team.

Ryan Hartwig — And so he realized, okay, I really have to back off a little bit on some of this direction that I’m offering. And so he stepped back.

Ryan Hartwig — I thought that was kind of, that’s a little bit different than a senior pastor at another church, church down in Tennessee. As we listen to that pastor, he’s really realized that his gifts really don’t reside in kind of managing day-to-day. And I think a lot of senior pastors have realized that. They don’t reside there.

Ryan Hartwig — And so he’s really handed that off to other folks, lets his executive pastor really manage the leadership team. But he said, it’s really important for me to stay engaged in the leadership activities.

Ryan Hartwig — And so there was a time when there was kind of a hole in their small groups ministry. This was a very large church, about 5,000 people. And rather, there was a hole there for small groups. He said, okay, I’m going to take on small groups myself for this season of time.

Ryan Hartwig — And so he led the small group ministry as a senior pastor of the church in every facet, where I think it was about six months to a year. I think it’s such a great indication of what healthy teams do, is that leaders say, okay, what is it that the team needs right now? And I’ll go ahead and provide that.

Ryan Hartwig — That senior pastor realized, okay, the best thing for me to do is to give up some of this more visionary kinds of things to others. And let me step into this place and provide leadership to our small group ministry in a way that he was kind of accountable to the other team members for small group ministry during that time.

Ryan Hartwig — I thought those two were just great profiles of, I think, the humility, of the thoughtfulness, of the strategicness, of how do we adjust things that we’re really able to lead collaboratively.

Warren Bird — Let me give one more example, if I could. Journey Church, Newark, Delaware. Ryan and I did separate visits on that. When Ryan was there, he captured the senior pastor, Mark Johnson, saying, you know, I used to lead the church, but now I lead the team as they lead the church.

Warren Bird — And so on my visit, I met some of those team members, and I thought, you know, here’s a 30-year-old woman who’s overseeing kind of the assimilation piece, the welcome, how do we get you connected. And she has been really mentored and given challenges and invited to rise to the challenge, and I thought that just being one case of, okay, Pastor Mark, if that’s the kind of people you’re leading and they’re rising to the challenge, you are just multiplying yourself all over.

Rich Birch — Absolutely.

Ryan Hartwig — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Yeah, one of the things I’ve found in just our little world is, as we take new ground as a church, so I’m a part of that four-part leadership team, senior leadership team, whatever we want to call it. As we take new ground, by definition, we’re moving into areas that it’s not really clear whose responsibility it is, that there are these areas where we’re doing new things, we’re trying to innovate, we’re trying to make something happen, and it kind of requires all of us on that team. We all have to pitch in, we all, you know, Tim from a teaching vision point of view, he’s got to talk about it, Dave from kind of a finance point of view, we’ve got to figure out how are the teams going to plug into this whole thing.

Rich Birch — And so you do end up having, and in fact, I just had one this week with Dave, where there’s this like, okay, so what part of this is yours and what part of it is mine? Like, and, because we don’t want to step on each other’s toes, we’re not trying to like, you know, offend each other, but we have to kind of be cognizant of talking through the actual process of how we’re going to lead, not just go ahead and lead. Like, how do we actually, you know, how are we going to make this thing happen?

Rich Birch — Because there’s enough potential there to rub each other the wrong way, which is, for me, is exciting, because I’m like, hey, we must be trying to do things that, you know, that aren’t just natural, don’t just happen, you know, independently, so, which is kind of cool, so.

Ryan Hartwig — I love the fact, Rich, that you’re having to have those conversations. One of the other things we found is that, is that churches that tend to have these stronger leadership teams are also facing challenges related to growth.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Ryan Hartwig — And I think that it’s tempting to kind of explain that, well, we have a good team, and so, of course, we’re growing. I would explain it the other way. I think it’s that we’re growing, which is forcing us to have a good team.

Ryan Hartwig — Like, in your case, right, because you’re growing, there’s this unknown stuff that’s out there causing you and Dave to sit down and have conversations that you would otherwise not have to have.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Ryan Hartwig — Now, because you and Dave are working through these things and making decisions together, and you’re making decisions that are benefiting from both of your perspectives, right, you’re growing in your capacity as a team, which is then, of course, fueling the church’s ability to grow and so on.

Ryan Hartwig — So I love the fact that you’re pursuing this new territory, and you realize the only way we can actually do this well is if we do this together as a team, which is one of the things we found, is that the best teams tend to make decisions together rather than to have individuals who make these really key strategic decisions, but instead they do it together as a team.

Rich Birch — Yeah, there was this moment a few years ago where, there was a distinct conversation where Tim, our lead pastor, who is our lead pastor, there isn’t, although we lead together with the four of us at the end of the day, he’s our lead pastor, he’s the founder of the church, and there was a real active conversation where there was some consideration of maybe we should hire or identify one of the four of us as kind of the second in command person, and that, from his perspective, and at the end of the day, he’s the only one that can make that decision. That is one of those things where it’s like, we can give our input, but at the end of the day, you’ve gotta figure out what you’re the most comfortable with, and we’re gonna talk it through, and there was this decision point where he said, no, I actually, and we obviously affirmed it in the end, we were like, no, I like the creative tension that it causes that we work together as a group rather than let’s make really super clear lines on everything.

Rich Birch — Now, functionally, what that means is we end up talking a lot. You end up having a lot of conversations about things, but I think the Lord honors that, and I think it’s a positive way to move forward as we try to grow and develop and try new things. Because the reality of it is, if you’re a growing church, a lot of times, you’re in the largest church you’ve ever been in, let alone worked in the largest church you’ve ever been in, and so it’s all unknown territory for most of the people around the room.

Rich Birch — All right, fantastic stuff there from Ryan. You really should pick up that book. His and Warren’s book is a must read. And that’s really the secret of this episode. What we’re doing is pointing back to content that is so, we think, foundational. We think it’s super important for you. In fact, they’re things that we come back to time and again, and this next segment is one of those.

Rich Birch — We’re doing this to celebrate Executive Pastor. Just drop by unseminary.com. Pick up this season’s copy. It’s all about staff issues.

Rich Birch — In this next segment, you’ll hear from Ken McAnulty. He is the executive pastor at Arise Church, one of the fastest growing churches in the country. And listen, Ken unpacks what they call their onboarding week: a super intentional, high impact way that sets new hires up to thrive.

Rich Birch — It’s not just about orientation. Lots of us have orientation. Tell people where the bathroom is. It’s about shaping culture from day one.

Rich Birch — If you’ve ever wondered, really, how do we start our staff? Well, this is going to be super helpful for you. This clip gives you some practical inspiration with a strong dose of vision. Let’s tune in.

Rich Birch — Onboarding staff. You know, I think as we hire staff, I think oftentimes, at least I know I do, and I think there’s a lot of friends who would be in a similar boat.

Rich Birch — We identify a problem area that we’re looking for someone to solve, and so we’re like, okay, we really need to, maybe the area’s grown, or like there’s a part of our church that just is not going well, and so we’re like, 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. 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?

Ken McAnulty — That’s a great question.

Rich Birch — How have, you know, what would be some of the, 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 McAnulty — 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 really, we discovered that it creates this awkwardness, this weirdness.

Ken McAnulty — 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, and have no idea what things you’re gonna step on. And we really felt that tension. We really felt that problem.

Ken McAnulty — And so our lead pastor, Pastor Brent, looked at me, and one of my counterparts, my co-workers, 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 we said, you know, well, 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 look like?

Ken McAnulty — And so we really just began to tailor this one-week experience that we call our onboarding week that really helps resolve those problems, and sets the pace for our staff. Because what we really wanna do is we want to, we wanna 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.

Ken McAnulty — 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 gonna live by for the first year.

Rich Birch — Oh that’s good.

Ken McAnulty — 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 gotta take that responsibility.

Rich Birch — That’s so good, I love that. What a great word, hey, this pace that we said at the beginning really is how they run, how they’ll, you know, how they’ll be a part of it. So let’s pull that apart a little bit.

Rich Birch — When you think about, I don’t know, well, the best way to do this, the first day, maybe even pre-first day, how are you setting that pace well? How are we kind of setting up this conversation in the earliest moments? What’s that look like?

Ken McAnulty — No, it’s a great question. You know, some of the first things that we wanna do is we wanna 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.

Ken McAnulty — So we wanna make sure that we have a dedicated space. We wanna 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 into their office.

Ken McAnulty — And so we set up a basic office setup for them. We make sure that we order their computers. So that means we have to communicate. Hey, do you want a Mac, a PC? What do you want on it? And then we put together a communication binder that’s ready for them on their desk.

Ken McAnulty — 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 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, which is kind of one of those really cool things. We try not to be too stalkerish with it, but, you know, we wanna make sure that…

Rich Birch — How are you finding out their favorite song? What do you, are you, do you like a form ahead of time or like, what’s that look like?

Ken McAnulty — So it really depends on the person. Sometimes we’ll reach out to the spouse who is, and we, you know, we kind of dig into that because their spouse oftentimes loves to have, you know, they want, they’re invested in their spouse being, having a great first day experience. And so we include them in on that.

Ken McAnulty — 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 Birch — I love it. That’s so good. A little bit of research goes a long way. That’s a great thing.

Ken McAnulty — It really does.

Rich Birch — It’s amazing how the, 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? It’s amazing how quickly those conversations come up and simple stuff, even just the computer having, you know, so many people in 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.

Rich Birch — Well, how do we go maybe beyond? So I love the physical setup stuff. I think that’s fantastic. 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 a part of the team.

Ken McAnulty — Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, it’s funny, this conversation that you and I’ve had have helped what we call put clothes on the baby that we birthed.

Rich Birch — Sure.

Ken McAnulty — And so we really have been able to kind of narrow down some things that we really wanna give to people in that first week that we really wanna impart to our staff. And so we discovered four things that we really wanna impart. And since I’m a preacher by nature, I did four C’s, you know, cause that’s how we work.

Ken McAnulty — 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, a sense of what am I walking into? What’s OK? What’s taboo?

Ken McAnulty — We want them to walk away with a sense of care, that they’re more, 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?

Ken McAnulty — So ideally after that first week, they’re gonna feel like they can run. Now we’re not gonna 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 we were just creating the baby, but really intentionally to kind of resolve these four issues.

Rich Birch — 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. Man, this is such an important piece of the puzzle.

Rich Birch — 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 McAnulty — 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 with this type of stuff.

Ken McAnulty — Those kinds of organizations say that culture trumps competency just every day of the week. And so we wanna make sure that we communicate that well. And so we give our pastor two hours 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.

Ken McAnulty — One of the really cool things that he does, and I don’t wanna spoil this for any future employees, but 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. And that’s the mission of the church, just to really kind of get their eyes in the right place. And then we take 30 minutes at a time and we set them down in front of the staff that they’re gonna work with and allow them to hear the stories of those staff members, which is really cool.

Ken McAnulty — In fact, the staff that we’ve onboarded have said that that is the most impactful thing that we do this week, is to set them down in front of those people. One of our staff members said it like this. He said, it humanizes the staff and creates open doors for deep conversations later.

Ken McAnulty — Another staff, 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 so it’s this intentionality of saying, hey, listen, we’re gonna plug you into relationships because those relationships will communicate culture.

Ken McAnulty — And as part of those 30 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.

Ken McAnulty — So when we allow our staff to communicate that, it just, man, it increases the impact of our culture. 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 this is gonna sound a little funny, but we do a truth or dare lunch with our staff.

Rich Birch — Truth or dare lunch? Things get spicy right off the top.

Ken McAnulty — They do, they do. We do that the last day of that week, but we really do that to allow some authenticity there and to really open up the door.

Ken McAnulty — What we’ve done at the beginning of the week is our staff has been authentic 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 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 because now they’re inside jokes that we all have together.

Ken McAnulty — And so it’s not just about, well, I’m trying to find my way to fit into this team. Now I fit because I have the inside jokes with them. 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, where we ask them to fill that out.

Ken McAnulty — 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 gonna be known for, who they’re gonna be. Because when we start at the end and we build a culture looking at the end, we can be intentional about that.

Ken McAnulty — So if I say, I wanna be somebody who’s kind, who that when I leave the staff say, I was always listening to them, that empowers me to now be a listener.

Rich Birch — Oh gosh – this is so good.

Ken McAnulty — And so we wanna be really intentional about allowing those folks to really kind of create their own path in our organization and really build those strengths.

Rich Birch — Oh, I love this. Now you gave me a sneak peek at this document. Would it be okay with you if we included this in the show notes for people?

Ken McAnulty — Absolutely.

Rich Birch — I think this, to be honest, friends, this is one of those things, you should just rip this thing off. It’s a word doc and you should put your church name into it. If that’s okay, Ken.

Ken McAnulty — Absolutely.

Rich Birch — 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 let’s build it into our onboarding. I just love that.

Rich Birch — All right, fantastic. Love that. We also have got that in the show notes. You’re gonna wanna pick that up.

Rich Birch — Okay, so the first, the last segment, not the first segment, the last segment, I wanna remind you, drop by unseminary.com, pick up this month’s edition, this season’s edition of Executive Pastor. You’re gonna love it. It’s free there. Just give us your email. We’ll email it over to you.

Rich Birch — And this last clip from just this last spring, it’s been an instant classic. Diana Rush from Eastside Church unpacks the unique challenges and challenges and opportunities of middle level management in a large multi-site church. This really was a fantastic episode, super practical. She provides you some great wisdom on how to manage both upward to senior leadership and downward to direct reports while trusting both sides.

Rich Birch — It’s really a fantastic clip. So listen to that, drop by unSeminary. Hope today’s episode has been inspiring to you. We’ll just end with this clip. I won’t be coming back at the end of this, but thanks so much. Thanks for being on this journey. Take care, friends.

Rich Birch — And one of these things that we’re gonna really dig into today is this whole idea of mid-level management in large churches. And this brings some really unique complexities. And we wanna unpack those for folks today.

Rich Birch — Talk to me about the tension between managing both upwards, so like executive pastor, senior pastor, but then also downward, direct reports, campus teams. Why are there, and again, I’m sure you never have any struggles at Eastside, but why do other churches struggle with that? Why is that? Why is this a common thing that we see? It’s a struggle. t’s hard to do that, to manage those tensions.

Diana Rush — I think some of the tension, it first starts with self. Like I always say, you have to start with the source material, your own person. And before you can lead others, you have to really understand yourself and be able to lead yourself well.

Diana Rush — And so it’s really getting to know who you are, who you’re made of. I love the illustration of, you have like an orange. And if an orange is squeezed from the top and bottom, it’s eventually going to burst. And what’s gonna come out is orange juice. It’s the same on the outside as the inside.

Diana Rush — And oftentimes in management roles, we are gonna be squeezed from the top. We’ve got the top coming down on us. Like we’ve got goals. We’ve got things to achieve. We’ve got expectations, but then we’ve got the expectations of those beneath us.

Diana Rush — People that maybe they’re struggling in their own journey or whatever it is, everyone’s wanting something from you. You’re gonna get squeezed in management. And if you are presenting this, like I am perfectly okay on the outside, that I’m not letting God form me on the inside, what’s gonna come out is gonna be really obvious.

Diana Rush — So if you’re struggling with anger, it’s gonna come out when you get squeezed. If you’re struggling with a multitude of issues, those will all reveal themselves. And so it starts really with like being good about making sure that you’re pursuing Christlikeness in your own life, that you’re actually asking, hey, Jesus, I wanna lead like you led others and I wanna shepherd my teams.

Diana Rush — So I think that’s where it starts. And then secondly, I would say it’s about building trust, both with those above you and those below you. If you are known for success, people will expect success. But if you are constantly making mistakes or going outside the lines, going rogue, then you’re never gonna build that trust and you’re not going to be handed things to further your path, or even you’re just gonna feel that upward tension of being micromanaged, right? No one likes to be micromanaged, but how do you get out of being micromanaged? You build trust.

Diana Rush — And then you have honest conversations with those above you. And so that, it’s a little bit of boldness as well. You have to not be afraid to ask hard questions. But again, when you have a trust in a relationship, I know for myself, I can talk to my executive pastor who I report to about nearly anything because we have this trust that we’ve built. Even before I started in this role reporting to him, I had already had an existing relationship with him where I felt like I could go to him if I had questions, concerns. So I had been building that trust even before I stepped into this role.

Diana Rush — And then the same thing with the staff below you. My team trusts that I’m gonna advocate for them, that I’m not going to overstep them, that I’m gonna let them lead and them shine. And so we can work together to make something great, make their plans into realities because I’m gonna sell it.

Diana Rush — I look at myself, middle management, I’m a salesperson. I’m gonna take their ideas and then I’m gonna sell it upwards and I’m gonna craft it into something so that I can convince everybody else that this is a great idea and we should try it out. So.

Rich Birch — Let’s double click on that idea of the salesperson because you captured their a tension that I’ve seen, I’ve been in, I have felt as a leader in this kind of middle management is like my senior pastor, the person that’s leading the organization, they’re getting filtered information and it’s frankly, it’s being filtered by me. I’m telling them this is what we see happening. Here’s what’s going on.

Rich Birch — Now, vice versa, the people who report to me, I’m filtering what my senior pastor would like them to do. And I’m helping kind of translate the vision of the church. I’m leading at the vision, at the intersection of vision and execution. So like, I’m trying to translate that.

Rich Birch — If I’m just selling, there’s an opportunity there to break trust because it could be like, I’m gonna just send, it’s all rainbows going up, rainbows and unicorns. Everything’s amazing. Everything’s going great. I tell my senior leader that and then vice versa. I can just report all good news to my direct reports.

Rich Birch — How do I avoid that tension and make sure that the true information, that good feedback’s building, that we’re building trust and that it’s built on, yeah, actually care for each other and reality, not just kind of what everybody wants to hear, which I think is a tension in these middle, mid-level roles.

Diana Rush — Yeah, so I’m just gonna say unpopular opinion, but we’re all in sales, and that’s just the reality. We’re all selling something, whether you’re selling an idea or yourself. But I think A, you have to be 100% sold out for the vision.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Diana Rush — So we’ve got the best product on earth, right? We are, you know, we’re representing Jesus. We’re representing eternal life and transformation and the hope that you can only find in Christ. And so right there, as long as your heart is connected to the vision of your senior pastor, it’s like, that’s not that difficult.

Diana Rush — Now, when you are presenting ideas, whether it’s a vision that your senior pastor is saying, hey, I have this idea of something I wanna do. You have to first wrap your mind around it. You have to get in with the vision, but it’s okay, in my opinion, no matter which way you’re going, to plant a naysayer. You have to think through all the complaints that might come or all the people will, but what about this? And so you have to be willing to prepare.

Diana Rush — And so honestly, I prepare for any presentation or any conversation, probably a little too much. One of my top strength finder is communication. And so for me, it’s just a natural thing that I talk my way through any scenario and any conversation. But it does allow me to walk into any situation prepared to explain.

Diana Rush — So whether it’s, Gene Appel, my senior pastor, has an idea for an all churchwide initiative that we’re going to be doing. We’re actually doing it right now. And I’m gonna be leading teams for this. I have to think, okay, well, what are all the pitfalls? What are the things that are going to cost us time? What are the negotiating tactics I need to have?

Diana Rush — So if I need my entire staff to now show up on a Wednesday night, what am I going to have to give them in return? And where can I give them space in their schedule so that they’re excited to be here and they don’t feel like it’s a burden. And so it’s that way I’m selling it.

Diana Rush — But then maybe Greg Curtis has an idea. He wants to get rid of our four week next steps program and move to one week first step.

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

Diana Rush — And so he’s gonna change our entire assimilation program. Well, I mean, for something like that, you have to really get prepared because I know I’m about to take a group of people on a journey who aren’t there with us already. I’m going to have to help some people who have long held sacred cows. Well, we always done it this way and release it.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Diana Rush — And so, honestly, it’s in your prep work, but it’s in your constant communication. You have to, again, you have to be sold out and believe in what the person wants and have those questions. I mean, Greg and I, we would sit in my office and talk over and over and over again about what changes he was gonna make because I have to be prepared for any questions from an executive pastor, senior pastor, even our director of finance, all these roles, I have to be able to go in and say, that’s a really good question and let’s process that together.

Diana Rush — And it’s never, as a salesperson or just anyone in leadership, you never wanna have a hard no and you never wanna be unbending. You wanna be flexible…

Rich Birch — Oh that’s good. That’s good.

Diana Rush — …and be able to receive the feedback and then say, okay, that’s a really good thought. And you wanna make the person feel heard at all times because that’s part of the process. It’s never a hard line. It’s never, you have to do this. Let’s talk about this. Let’s make it a conversation.

Diana Rush — Because I want senior leadership, but I also want those reporting to me to have ownership over any idea and any direction that we go, which means I have to let them speak into the plan and speak into the idea so that they do feel that sense of like, okay, I can be a part of this. I can do this. And I think this is gonna be a success.

Welcome back to the unSeminary podcast. Today we’re joined by Steece Hayes, a bi-vocational pastor and account manager at Higher Ground Managed IT, part of the ACS Technologies family.

Is your ministry struggling with unreliable tech, security risks, or outdated systems—and you’re not even sure where to begin fixing it? Tune in as Steece brings practical insights to help churches focus on ministry—not troubleshooting printers or battling cyber threats.

Learn more about Higher Ground IT and schedule a free call with Steece to walk through your concerns at www.highergroundit.com.

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Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. You know, our tagline here at unSeminary is stuff you wish they taught in seminary. And today’s podcast, I can guarantee you is one of those things that you wish they taught you in seminary because they don’t teach this stuff in seminary.

Rich Birch — And so today we brought an expert on, you’re gonna wanna lean in because I know this is an area that you have had frustration and could actually be holding your ministry back and it shouldn’t. And there’s people out there that want to help you.

Rich Birch — Super excited to have Steece Hayes with us. He’s a bi-vocational pastor, is also an account manager at an organization called Higher Ground Managed IT. They’re a part of the ACS Technologies family and they founded with a really simple mission they want to help churches focus on ministry and not troubleshooting or fixing technology. He has a doctoral degree in church revitalization and wants to help churches or struggling churches; this really is a passion of his. Steece, welcome to the show

Steece Hayes — Thanks, man. Glad to be here.

Rich Birch — Honored that you have taken some time. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background? You sit in it you know an interesting vantage point, being both a bi-vocational pastor and working with in kind of helping IT solutions in churches. Tell us a little bit of your journey. How did you end up here? Talk us through all of that.

Steece Hayes — Well, it’s kind of an interesting story. It’s a little bit part of my testimony. Actually, I was not really living as a Christian whenever I first started working at ACS Technologies. Uh, uh, shortly thereafter I got married to my wife, who had been at ACS for several years prior to me.

Rich Birch — Oh nice.

Steece Hayes — And she, and I’m sure there’s a lot of other guys out there who have the same story. She grabbed me by the nap of the neck and dragged me into church and said, you’re going to sit here and listen. And and, you know, so I did. And you know being at ACS, surrounded by other Christian brothers and sisters and working with churches, and then, of course, the influence of my wife and church, I really started feeling the call to ministry. And I was encouraged by my pastor at the time and just started down that road of learning, being engulfed in what it means to be a follower of Christ. And then also being able to, in a professional sense, work with churches every day and helping them with their ministries.

Steece Hayes — And originally I was working with our our software and the the software side of things. And so, you know, several, about 10 years ago or so, did that. Just went to seminary, branched out, started pastoring small churches and have just continued that to this day. So I have a passion for the smaller church.

Steece Hayes — Although we work with a lot of very large churches. You know, the small church is the majority. And so I love helping them, especially with IT, because they really struggle in that that regard. Even the bigger ones struggle with it as well. So ACS and and the church and me being a pastor are all kind of intertwined into one big story.

Rich Birch — Love it. So good. Well, let’s define terms ah even before we begin. Because I know even IT, information technology, that can be like a buzzword that people aren’t really sure, like, what does that actually mean? Like when you say IT, what does that cover? What is that kind of the spectrum ah you know for a church leader that might be listening in?

Steece Hayes — Yeah, really, IT is going to be the network infrastructure, meaning the actual devices, the things, right? The computers, the servers, if you have any switches, which you may or may not even know what that is. But, you know, all the actual devices, the wireless in the building, the things that are tangible that you can touch.

Rich Birch — The printers! Why can’t we get the printer to print?

Steece Hayes — Yes.

Steece Hayes — Yeah. And why my computer talked to that printer yesterday and it doesn’t talk to it today.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Steece Hayes — Why?

Rich Birch — Yeah. Yes.

Steece Hayes — Yeah.

Rich Birch — They’ll never fix that. They’ll never fix that problem. That’s like a, you know, that my son and I were joking about that. My son just started kind of at his first full-time big person job. And we were joking about that. Like, listen, listen, I’m a few years older. It’s never, going back to dot matrix this has been a problem.

Rich Birch — So, sorry, I’m already explaining some of my pain to you as an IT professional. So it’s all the devices. It’s the things. It’s the network. It’s the switches, the laptops, the desktops, all of that. That’s, when when we say IT, that’s that’s the kind of scope of what we’re talking about?

Steece Hayes — Yeah, yeah, it’s keeping all that stuff intertwined, working together, talking with each other, efficient, effective, those sort of things. Now, I will say that what it it does not include is going to be production, media, sound, video, all that. That that’s while they’re very related and the media side, the production side of a church, depends very heavily on the IT infrastructure, we’re not sound engineers and mics and and video and that sort of thing.

Rich Birch — Right. That’s good.

Steece Hayes — So that’s a little more specialized. Now we’ve worked with those folks quite a bit in churches. But we talk IT, we’re not getting to that point.

Rich Birch — Okay. That’s good. Okay. That makes sense. So most churches obviously don’t have a full-time person who thinks about these things. This just isn’t, this is not, you know, and in fact it, it’s, you know, it may maybe be a rare exception of churches that have someone who they can call up to help with this kind of thing. What are some of the common problems, tech problems that you see churches struggling with? Maybe what are some of the pain points that bring them to even reach out to you guys? What’s that look like?

Steece Hayes — Yeah, there’s several. And actually one we didn’t mention a second ago, but phone systems, we we help a lot of churches with phones.

Rich Birch — Oh, of course. Yeah, yeah, of course.

Steece Hayes — Phones are a big one because churches are outdated. I mean, they’re they’re just antiquated with their phone system because most of us are in the mind that we go to the Bell, right? We go to Southern Bell or AT&T or one of the the legacy phone companies. Or nowadays, even the cable company will go to them for their phone system.

Rich Birch — Right.

Steece Hayes — Generally speaking, they’re not great. Customer support is terrible.

Rich Birch — Right.

Steece Hayes — The phones are outdated. They don’t work. We don’t know how to change the voicemail. You know, how do I transfer calls?

Rich Birch — Okay.

Steece Hayes — All these sort of things. So phones are a big thing right now. We’re seeing a huge shift in churches getting away from using personal phones, personal cell phones and stuff like that, and start to incorporate that into a more of a corporate idea or a church phone system.

Rich Birch — Okay.

Steece Hayes — So that now when you call the pastor, instead of calling his personal number, you’re calling him on the church’s number and it just rings directly to him. And he answers it on his cell phone, even if he’s you know…

Rich Birch — Right.

Steece Hayes — …making a visit at the hospital or whatever. But it’s kind of bringing all of this. So so phone is a big area that we see a lot of churches really struggling with. Another one, which is sort of related, is outdated equipment. You know, when was the last time they updated their computers in the office or, you know, their switches or just the wireless, the Wi-Fi in the building? I mean, you know, we put that thing in 10 years ago and it’s sort of working, but we’ve been band-aiding it the whole time.

Rich Birch — Right. Yeah, that’s good.

Steece Hayes — So, you know, that’s another one. Underpowered equipment, they they’ve grown, but they never updated their IT. They never updated their network.

Rich Birch — That’s so good.

Steece Hayes — And then I think probably the biggest one is security. They’re just not secure.

Rich Birch — Oh, wow.

Steece Hayes — Churches are very insecure when it comes to cybersecurity. And we’re seeing a pretty huge trend of cyber criminals attacking churches because they see them as low hanging fruit, because honestly, they are.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Steece Hayes — So I would say those are the big ones.

Rich Birch — Yeah, let’s we’re gonna put a pin in that. I do wanna come back and ask you specifically on the security question, because that’s an area wanna highlight a little bit. In fact, that might be like a whole other conversation, but well, I wanna highlight that. We’ll come back to that.

Rich Birch — But talk to us about, um just because we’re getting a sense of the scope here, there there’s also this like um underpowered, overpowered thing where I don’t know whether this has been your experience, but my experience has been, you know, so all the churches I’ve worked for have been fairly large churches, like statistically a thousand plus, thousand to 5,000. There’s not a lot of those out there, but even in a church like that, it’s, it seems like the squeaky wheels get the get get the best computers. Yeah.

Rich Birch — Like, it’s like you have some people have these like killer systems that feel like we could send someone to Mars with them. And then somebody who might actually, maybe they’re a graphic designer or they might actually need like a really a computer that does a lot, but they’re just like friendly. And so they don’t get the most powerful computer. They’re maybe are underpowered. Do you see that where there’s like an imbalance of like tool to meet task? Is that an issue that you bump into?

Steece Hayes — Yeah, that and generally speaking, with in your scenario, it’s going to be the media guys, right?

Rich Birch — Right.

They’ve got the $5,000 supercomputer that they’re using to run production…

Rich Birch — Right.

Steece Hayes — …and and the soundboard and they’re they’re doing all these things.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Steece Hayes — They’ve got all this equipment that’s really, really expensive. And yet the, you know, the ministry assistant or the secretary is using a Windows 7 computer that’s 35 years old. you know So we we do see that quite often. We that that’s a thing.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Steece Hayes — What more specifically of what I’m referring to about underpower and overpower is things like wifi. You know, people don’t understand. And what most people, when they think of computers and technology, they think more power is better.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Steece Hayes — You know, let’s get more. And actually that can be counterintuitive. We’ve we’ve been in several churches where they had wifi in the building, but all their antennas or the, what we call access points are set to 11, right? They’re, they’re, they’re at max level.

Steece Hayes — And what happens is, is that the signals are bouncing off of each other and the signals terrible in the building because everything’s turned up to the max. Or the other way is we’ve had churches that, you know, they they have 1,000, 1,500, 2,000 people, and they’re using equipment that they bought from Best Buy.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Steece Hayes — And it’s like, that’s just not, that’s intended for your house.

Rich Birch — Yes. Yes.

Steece Hayes — That’s not great for this environment.

Rich Birch — Right.

Steece Hayes — And Wi-Fi is just an easy one to pick on, but that’s kind of an idea of…

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

Steece Hayes — …you know, churches will go down to Best Buy or order something off Amazon all the time that will, you know, kind of scratch the itch they have…

Rich Birch — Right.

Steece Hayes — …but it’s not really designed for what we would call an enterprise application.

Rich Birch — Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Totally makes sense. Okay. So yeah I know that you guys have something called the care framework for churches. Help us kind of unpack that a little bit. Talk us through what does that look like and how does it help us be effective on this front to think through how we manage our IT well? Because frankly, to be honest, this is one of those areas where I see churches stumble.

Rich Birch — Like it’s like, this is, man, if like, it would be a sin for our computers to hold us back. Like we just, we should fix this. There’s people out there that can actually solve these problems. So how do you help them? What’s that look like? Talk us through that framework.

Steece Hayes — Yeah, and kind of with that idea and what you had said earlier, you know IT generally, in a lot of churches, is a very, very bottom of the barrel budget item. Most churches don’t spend a lot of money on them. Most churches don’t even have an IT budget. And if they do, it’s very underpowered, to use that same phrase. So what we do is is we have care, and that simply means clarify, architect, reinforce, and evolve.

Steece Hayes — So clarify would be our first engagement with a church, would be to understand what they have. You know, what devices do you have? What computers do you have? Are they up to date? Are they not? What are your security issues? Are you secure? Are you not secure? Kind of talk through educating them – basically getting a good understanding of what their IT system and situation currently is. So that would be the clarify side of it.

Steece Hayes — Then we get into architect. That would be the A. And so architect would be starting to design and build out what should your IT look like for the church. And so that may be, do you need servers or do you not need servers? That’s a big conversation a lot of churches are having today. How do we want to work with you? Do we want to manage the entire thing for you and you are hands off? Many of our churches choose that because they don’t have anybody that knows how to do it anyway. So they allow us just to handle it all.

Steece Hayes — Some of the larger churches are like, hey, we will co-manage with you. So in other words, they are still involved. They’re doing a lot of work, but we are are there sort of as an umbrella to help them, to guide them, to do a lot of the minutia that they don’t have time for. But it’s also sort of putting everything in place, making sure the reporting is there, making sure all the devices are hooked up, everything’s working, everybody’s there. So we build that architect for them and then show that to them.

Steece Hayes — And then once they decide that we’re we’re a good fit for them, we implement it. So we put all those in place, all the workflows, the automations, making sure that all the tools are in place, helping them with any kind of remote workforce stuff that they may do, because a lot of people work remotely nowadays.

Steece Hayes — But basically getting all that set up and running. And then they’re in good they’re in a good shape. And then the last would be evolve. And so evolve would be, okay, we’re we’re managing it. Everything’s working. Life is happy. Everything’s going well. Now let’s start looking at the next step. So back to those devices and that equipment, you know, how many of your computers are out of date? How many of your switches are 10 years old? All right. We decided in the whole process that you probably didn’t need that server after all. Remember servers are $6000-$10,000 to replace. Oftentimes, and in today’s cloud world they’re just not needed a whole lot.

Rich Birch — Right.

Steece Hayes — So maybe know after we’ve gotten everything set up and running, now we look at, okay, let’s start simplifying some of these things. Let’s put in a budget and a plan for replacing a few switches over the next year or two years. Let’s get you out of that server um you’ve got a handful of computers that are just out of date. What’s our plan for for doing that. So all of that is working with the church on budgeting. Churches don’t have unlimited funds, as we all know. How can we do this in steps? We triage it, what’s the most important. And over the next you know couple of years, we will evolve them from being a band-aid shop to really state-of-the-art, but inside of their budget.

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s great.

Steece Hayes — So that’ that’s sort of the evolve.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Steece Hayes — So clarify, architect, reinforce, evolve. And there’s a lot of little small steps in all of that.

Rich Birch — Sure. Of course.

Steece Hayes — But it’s trying to get them from where they are today to where they really need to be.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Steece Hayes — And we work with large and small churches. So that varies a little bit depending on their size and scope.

Rich Birch — Yeah. What’s the kind of, what’s the sweet spot? Obviously, like, you know, you’ll work with, with anybody obviously, but what is the kind of sweet spot of a church that you would say, Hey, here’s a church where you probably should bring us in. I’m assuming if it’s like, even if you have just two staff, cause already you’re like, you’ve got some sort of network, you’re printing some stuff. You’ve got a couple of computers. You got to get them to talk well together, but what would that look like? What does it give us a sense of the size question?

Steece Hayes — It varies a little bit, but I would say once a church, well, first of all, if a church finds themselves needing IT help, they they are struggling with it. Maybe they have some volunteers that are kind of helping with it. Volunteers are wonderful. We love volunteers, even corporate. I mean, we just, we love that the church has those volunteers and we never want to take the volunteer out of the equation because that may be their giftedness, right? That may be their way of serving the kingdom. So we don’t want to take them out.

Steece Hayes — But oftentimes volunteers are limited in their time and their scope and what they can… And also volunteers tend to lot of times be limited in their understanding. They don’t know all of this.

Rich Birch — Right. Yeah. They’re not thinking about it all day long. Yeah.

Steece Hayes — They’re not. And so really, once you get up, I would say probably five computers.

Rich Birch — Yep. Okay.

Steece Hayes — And you’re you’re working with a staff that is not knowledgeable, the staff is busy…

Rich Birch — Yep.

Steece Hayes — …and you you see your IT starting to kind of go backwards a little bit, we’re having problems. And we’re having to call the local IT shop down the street to come in and fix things. Generally speaking, that’s when we would like to have that engagement. So that five, maybe on the small end to 10, although we’ve got some clients that have two computers.

Rich Birch — Right, right.

Steece Hayes — But that 5 to 10 computer size, and everything is being run by by volunteers or staff that… and here’s what we’ll see a lot of times in churches is the youth pastor is usually the one that’s assigned to it because he’s the young guy.

Rich Birch — There’s some stereotypes that just are true.

Steece Hayes — Yeah [inaudible] it’s either the the youth or the children’s guy or or lady…

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Steece Hayes — …and they’ll tap them because hey you’re in your 30s, you know what this you know this technology stuff is.

Rich Birch — Yes. You seem to know how to use your cell phone. You can fix this. Yeah.

Steece Hayes — Sure, you know how to do all this stuff. And so they’re over their head and this isn’t their job.

Rich Birch — Yeah. Right.

Steece Hayes — And so that’s where we come in and we kind of take that burden off of them.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Steece Hayes — And for the volunteers, we still use them quite often. You know, we’ll we’ll help. They’ll do some stuff around the church. They’re still involved in the process. But, you know, we’re taking all the heavy lifting and we’re doing all the minutiae and we’re there to to back them up and support them.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. Well, and I can imagine if I, and this may not be the kind of thing you’re thinking about, but if you’re thinking, you know, in the next couple of years, I can imagine us hiring a few more people, that this would be like something you want to get done on the front end.

Rich Birch — It’s like, Hey, I’m envisioning a season of hiring. Hey, we should bring somebody in now and kind of get this set up right. Get it kind of clearly aligned before. So that by the time those staff land, man, things are are set up and and well.

Rich Birch — I want to go back to the cybersecurity question. This is ah is a real issue, obviously. I don’t want to be like fear mongering to people, but I do also want to be really clear. What are some real risks that that we that frankly some leaders might not be aware of and that really we should be taking some steps towards? I know a friend of mine, they had their organization had a security breach that was like tragic, like it’s very bad for the organization. And so I don’t want people to live through that. So help help us understand what are some of those risks. Without a fear mongering kind of thing, what are some real things we should be thinking about on this front?

Steece Hayes — Yeah, cybersecurity is a hard conversation to have with now without coming out sounding fear-mongering…

Rich Birch — Yes. Yes. Crazy. Yeah.

Steece Hayes — …because it’s a it’s a very real problem and it’s a very real threat. So ah the the number one threat out there today is phishing.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Steece Hayes — So for for those of your audience that may not be familiar with phishing, although I think most people are today, it’s those emails. And and we even have smishing, which would be SMS, same idea. And it’s some bad actor out there, a bad guy has sent you an email with the idea that they want you to click on something or interact with it in some way. Right?

Steece Hayes — And when you do interact with it, they are stealing information, whether it’s credentials or something they’re getting from you that they can then turn around and penetrate your network, penetrate your system, do something, do some bad act with it. And so it usually comes through an email or through an SMS or something like that.

Steece Hayes — That’s number one. That is hitting everybody across the board. So one of the things that we do is that we engage the church with phishing. So we phish them. We have on staff what I call white hat hackers. I mean, these are really scary guys who are very good at that.

Rich Birch — Sure.

Steece Hayes — And but but they’re good guys, right? And they’re they’re serving the church. And they will use what’s called social engineering means they’ll go to your website. They’ll look around, they’ll see some events and things like this. And they will then send an email to the church saying, Hey, we see you’ve got this event coming up next week. Click here to enter in a, get an offering or not an offering, but a…

Rich Birch — Right.

Steece Hayes — …a raffle or something we’re going to have at the event you can enter here. And so they’ll click on that button because it sounds innocent.

Rich Birch — Right.

Steece Hayes — And the bad guy, if it were truly a bad guy, has them. So we’ll do that. And then we follow that up with training. And, hey, here’s what you look for. Here’s how to recognize it. Here’s how to avoid it.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Steece Hayes — And our risk manager here at ACS, you know, his his whole mantra is your inbox is hostile territory. Just assume everything that comes in is bad.

Rich Birch — Yes. Yes. Yeah, it’s true. Be very suspicious.

Steece Hayes — Oh, 100%. And it’s not only true for you know your professional world at the church or your job or wherever you are. It’s true in your personal life.

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s very true.

Steece Hayes — You know that this is is a big problem. So phishing is a big one. That’s a huge problem today.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Steece Hayes — The next next one would just be network intrusion in general. That would be having vulnerabilities in your network, having servers that’s not patched, not having a firewall, you know having your Wi-Fi that’s open to the whole universe and anybody can just come in and have access to it and they’re in your network. So those are the two big ones.

Rich Birch — Yeah. And and friends, this the interesting thing about this whole area is I think for some reason, there’s like shame or like embarrassment out there around when this stuff actually happens and people don’t talk about it. And so, you know, this stuff actually happens in organizations. It actually happens in churches. And it happened in my organization. My finance person got an email from me saying—and this is a really common one—saying, hey, could you get five ah gift cards online from for these volunteers? And um I’m just in between meetings – can you can you book them, and just send me back the codes and sent a link to it or whatever.

Rich Birch — And she almost took action on it. She almost took the step. And she’s an incredibly smart person. Like this is this is not she’s but then she she gave me a ring and she said, hey, I just want to double check on these gift cards. Well, that’s the first time I heard about that. And then as she was talking to me, she was like, oh, of of course this was not true. But it was socially engineered close enough. That’s just outside of something I would do. Like it was it was like not that strange. Hey, we want to thank these volunteers. We you know, we and wouldn’t be crazy for me to say, let’s get gift cards and give to them like that’s not like a crazy thing.

Rich Birch — But it, you know, smart enough. And another, and I’m just saying this friends, not to freak you out, but again, to make you aware: church I know, I’ve done some work with, church of a couple thousand people, they have, and all of their systems are super automated. They have a lot of production stuff that’s super automated. And um they were having repeated technical problems, like repeated technical problems. Like stuff in their audio, stuff in their lighting, stuff on their phone you know their phones, like all this over weeks and could not figure it out.

Rich Birch — And finally came to the end of it and realized, oh, they have someone who’s intruded their system and is it’s just they’re just a vandal. Like they’re in, you know, destroying their lighting system, in destroying you know audio, at like during services, like canning stuff and like. So they had to go through a significant thing like, hey, we’re changing it all. We got to go back. Everybody, you know, two factor authentication, all that stuff again. Again, and this was this is a smart church. They’re doing good work. These people are not knuckle draggers. They’re smart people. But there’s like an embarrassment out there to even talk about this stuff. But it happens, friends. You want someone like you.

Rich Birch — So how how do you, let’s pivot and talk a little bit more specifically about the services that you provide. Give us a sense of how does this all fit together? How does Higher Ground or ACS, how do how do they actually help a church in this area? What does a typical engagement look like?

Steece Hayes — Well, it would be the care would be sort of the the overall framework…

Rich Birch — Yeah. Yeah.

Steece Hayes — …but but it would basically be to talk to the church and find out, you know, where are you? You know, what what’s your current IT situation? And then trying to to raise them up a level. Like we want them to level up in what they’re doing. There’s almost no way that we’re going to 127 percent prevent all cyber crimes.

Rich Birch — Right.

Steece Hayes — I mean, unfortunately, the days of the Nigerian prince emails are gone.

Rich Birch — Right. No, it’s true.

Steece Hayes — Today, the cyber criminals are way sophisticated.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah.

Steece Hayes — And so what what we want to do is is is really twofold is one, make them as secure as possible. So we want to take them from being really low hanging fruit to being a little further up on the tree. So if something, if a bad guy is out there kind of shotgunning, looking around for vulnerabilities, your church isn’t going to be one of those he’s going to find, because you’re going to be a lot more difficult, a lot more fortified for the bad guy. So that’s going to be one of the things we’re going to look at.

Steece Hayes — And the other thing is, is just internal efficiency. What do you guys, I mean, the number of churches that we run into that have both Microsoft 365 and Google workspaces, it’s like you guys aren’t efficient.

Rich Birch — Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s good.

Steece Hayes — You know, they’re they’re not backing up their data.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Steece Hayes — They’re like, hey, we we’ve got all our stuff is in Microsoft 365. Yeah, guess what? Microsoft doesn’t back that stuff up. If one day it goes away, you’ve just lost it. And so how do we back up your data? How do we keep your data safe, right? And secure and accessible.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Steece Hayes — So, I mean, there’s a ton of different things and ways that we engage with the church. It really is what does that church need today? And then that evolve part, of course, would be what are you going to need tomorrow and the next day and going so forth.

Steece Hayes — But I want to hit on something you said earlier about looking to grow and add staff and things like that.

Rich Birch — Yep. For sure.

Steece Hayes — Generally speaking, working with a managed service provider like Higher Ground, we’re going to be significantly less expensive than hiring a full-time person.

Rich Birch — Right, right.

Steece Hayes — A lot less expensive.

Rich Birch — For sure.

Steece Hayes — And so if a church is looking to grow and you’re wanting to expand and things like that, we, I personally, would rather you spend that money in hiring a youth pastor or a children’s minister or growing the ministry…

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Steece Hayes — …and not spend a whole lot of money in your IT staff. Again, some churches need it because they’re a large church and they need to have an IT person there. But we can do a lot of the work that a full-time person would would do and you don’t necessarily need to to add staff for that.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

Steece Hayes — Yeah, those those are all the different areas that that we look at.

Rich Birch — So good. Now, this I didn’t we didn’t talk about this ahead of time, but let’s picture I’m a church of like a thousand people and I let’s say I’m an executive pastor and I’m like, I just have this niggling feeling that we’re not performing well on this front. Like this is an area that, you know, we, we have the kid who is like, I’m not sure whether they’re any good at this stuff or not doing it. And I’m like, I don’t know. Do you guys provide a service or is there a way for you to come in and kind of do like an audit, help us understand, even get clarity? Will you do like the first step and be like, Hey, just help us understand that kind of see where are we at? Is that, is that the kind of thing that you, you provide? Is there ah an opportunity for that?

Steece Hayes — Yeah, yeah, yeah. We actually have. And we we can provide a security assessment for them.

Rich Birch — Okay, nice.

Steece Hayes — What it is, is basically we we would send to them this assessment and they would go through it. It’s a series of questions, lots of different questions, and they would answer the questions. And at the end of it, it will give them a score where they scored on their assessment. And as you may imagine, the vast majority, and I would say probably 80 to 90% of, of every church has ever taken this assessment score at 50% or below, which is really bad.

Rich Birch — Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And this is not like golf where you want a low low score.

Steece Hayes — No, no, no.

Rich Birch — But I’m also thinking more than just the kind of security stuff.

Rich Birch — What about IT in general? Like, I feel like I’ve got problems on, you know, it’s maybe not on the security side, but it is in the like, I man, like we got problems with, in order to get that printer to work, we have to like, you have to stand on one foot and, you know, shake your hand a certain way to get it to work. Those kinds of problems. Can you help us audit that too?

Steece Hayes — Yeah, I mean, that’s part of sort of the clarify is when we have that conversation is…

Rich Birch — Yes. Part of that service. Yeah.

Steece Hayes — …you know, come to us and say, hey here’s our problem.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Steece Hayes — And these conversations don’t cost the church anything.

Rich Birch — Right.

Steece Hayes — I mean I, you know, I do this every day.

Rich Birch — Right.

Steece Hayes — And this is, you know, here’s our problems. These are the things we’re running into. And then we can guide you. And I’ve worked with many churches where we never charge them. Imean, they never bought any of our services, but we had conversations just to help them.

Rich Birch — Right. It’s not a great business. Just kidding.

Steece Hayes — But at the end of the day, I mean, we still want to help the church. I mean, this is a ministry…

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, that’s good. Yeah.

Steece Hayes — …even though it’s a business, it’s still a ministry. And so we can talk them through some steps on things that they can do. For instance, you know, having a password manager. You know, a password manager is a really inexpensive way for the church to control and to make all their passwords all in one place. They can keep them. They can make their passwords complex. They don’t need to spend a whole lot of money on that. It’s a pretty inexpensive, cheap way of doing that.

Steece Hayes — The phishing awareness training and everything I was talking about earlier, they can do that up front day one, and it’s really cheap. I mean, it’s really inexpensive to do that. And we will even walk through, you know, what are your computers? When was the last time they were updated? Are you patching them?

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s good.

Steece Hayes — You know, things like that. So, you know, we have a lot of conversations with with churches about easy things that they can fix without spending a lot of money on. But that’s that conversation. We just need to talk to them and find out what what problems they’re having.

Rich Birch — Yeah. That’s so good. I noticed, so friends, you want to go to highergroundit.com, top right-hand corner. There’s a “schedule a call” button. You can do that literally while we are on that while we’re wrapping up this episode. You could do that today.

Rich Birch — If I go and click on that “schedule a call” button, what happens? Who do I talk to? Reduce some anxiety around that being like, oh, they’re just going to try to sell me on something. Tell tell me about how you can help me. Because what I hear you saying is, hey, you want to help churches, which I know that’s what you want to do. Obviously, I’m paying a little of the devil’s like a advocate here, but help us understand a little bit of, of, of what would that look like if I was to do that today?

Steece Hayes — Yeah, and that would be it. I mean, we would just simply talk about your your system, where you are, what your struggles are, what your pain point, what you’re concerned with, your worries. And we simply talk through that.

Steece Hayes — And again, I am perfectly happy with us having a conversation and getting off the phone and you never buying anything, but you feel better.

Rich Birch — Yeah. Yeah. That’s good.

Steece Hayes — And you’re going to go do a few of these easy, easy fixes, right? I’m perfectly happy with that. But for many folks, they’re like, hey, we need this and we need it every day. We need it 24/7. We need you guys to help us be a part of the solution. And so in that case, we’ll we’ll have a longer engagement and work with the church to to make them better.

Rich Birch — That’s great. So again, ah you want to go to highergroundit.com and click on that schedule a call button. That would be a great way to kind of get the ball rolling today. Anything else you’d like to share with us, Steece, just as today as we kind of wrap up today’s episode?

Steece Hayes — I would say for all the churches out there, small, medium, or large, IT needs to be something you’re thinking about.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Steece Hayes — It needs to be something that that’s important to you. Many churches don’t even have an IT budget. Have that conversation. Figure out where your budget needs to be.

Steece Hayes — And I will say, for all those out there that are weren’t running anything outside of Windows 11, Microsoft ends their support of Windows 10 coming up in Nov or in October. So as of October, if you are not using a Windows 11 computer…

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Steece Hayes — …it is no longer supported, which means security is going to be a major problem for you. That’s a big tip there.

Rich Birch — No, that’s good. That’s really good. So ah again, if you don’t know what that is, you can click the “schedule a call” button. He’d even help you understand if you’re using Windows 10, that might save you right there. So, or you maybe send an email. Maybe that might be an easier way ah to to do that.

Steece Hayes — That’s right.

Rich Birch — Well, this has been fantastic, Steece. I really appreciate highergroundit.com. Anywhere else we want to send people online to kind of track with you guys?

Steece Hayes — That’s the main area. And all of those inquiries will come to me.

Rich Birch — Great.

Steece Hayes — I’ll be the one that that will field those and we’ll have the conversations. We’ll help them out. So looking forward to talking to folks.

Rich Birch — Great. Thanks so much for being here today.

Steece Hayes — Thanks, man.

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of unSeminary! A quick heads-up: Rich experienced some sound issues during the recording; thank you for bearing with us. Fortunately, our guest Yolanda comes through loud and clear, and you won’t want to miss the incredible insights she shares. Thanks for your grace and enjoy the conversation!

Do you ever feel like your church’s decisions are more emotional than intentional? Is your church struggling with inconsistent processes or reactive planning? In this episode of the unSeminary Podcast, we’re joined by Yolanda Stewart, Executive Pastor at Mosaic Church in Tennessee—one of the fastest-growing churches in America. Tune in as Yolanda shares a practical, Spirit-led decision-making framework that’s helping Mosaic Church thrive at every level.

Learn more about Mosaic Church by visiting mymosaic.ch.

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!

Rich Birch — Hey friends, Rich Birch here from the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. Really looking forward to today’s conversation. Today, we are talking about something that I know is going to be super applicable to all of us. We are often faced, how do we make decisions? How do we move forward? How do we push our ministries to what we believe God’s calling to us next and today’s conversation is going to help us think through those yeah those kinds of conversations. It’s going to be great. We’ve got Yolanda Stewart with us. She’s the executive church pastor at a church called Mosaic Church. It’s led by pastors Anthony and Julia Daly, it’s a multi-site church with locations in Tennessee as well as church online, it’s one of the fastest growing churches in the country. Yolanda, so glad to have you here – welcome!

Yolanda Stewart — Rich, thank you for having me. I’m glad to be here.

Rich Birch — This is an honor. Thank you for taking time. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about the church and tell us about your role, maybe a little bit of the background, ah help us understand a little bit about Mosaic.

Yolanda Stewart — It’d be my pleasure. So Mosaic, you mentioned it earlier, is a multi-site church, and we are mission-focused. Many of the things that we get to do for the kingdom happened outside of the United States, outside the walls of of our church.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Yolanda Stewart — So we have ministry in Africa. We have ministry in Honduras, ministry in China. And of the things that is near and dear to us is reaching people who are ah the underserved, if you will, those who are, there’s not a lot of people in mind to help those types of people.

Rich Birch — Love that.

Yolanda Stewart — And and which we feel a mandate for us to to to do that. And so we are we are entrenched in missions and we love it. Also, Mosaic is very busy making an effort to impact our community. And so we have several nonprofits that we are are the pioneers for, and in they are in partnership with the city of Clarksville.

Yolanda Stewart — Our there is that if the doors of our church close that the mayor would be beating on the doors asking what can he do to open our doors again? And so we we are busy doing that. We have a transitional home for ah foster care children. We do senior accessibility modifications so that they can age in place…

Rich Birch — So good.

Yolanda Stewart — …and we also have ah developed a community housing development organization where we’re building affordable homes, and I get the privilege to be the executive director of those three programs.

Rich Birch — Wow.

Yolanda Stewart — And so at the church, my role also includes executive oversight of discipleship, military support, pastoral care, um outreach. And yeah, so that’s what I’m busy doing.

Rich Birch — That’s everything. Well, you’re busy. You’re not sitting around looking for stuff to do. That’s for sure.

Yolanda Stewart — It’s an adventure.

Rich Birch — Tell us. Yeah. Tell us that’s great. That’s so good. Love hearing about all the stuff that Mosaic is engaged in and the real difference, tangible difference you’re making in both here locally and internationally. It’s really great.

Rich Birch — Tell us a little bit about your background. What what was your kind of life journey that brought you to Mosaic?

Yolanda Stewart — Sure. Well, Rich, I’m a 29-year veteran. I served in the United States Army.

Rich Birch — Thank you.

Yolanda Stewart — And my last duty station was Fort Campbell, Kentucky, which is just right up the road from Mosaic. I was invited to Mosaic by a a friend that that I’ve I’ve been friends over 30 years now. Our children ah grew up together. But um My time in the military really cultivated leadership qualities that I didn’t know that I possessed, but um you know that was a a training ground for me. And it’s really cool how Uncle Sam prepared me, and leveraged the Holy Spirit ah to, excuse me, leverage my military experience. And then ah coupled that with the Holy Spirit, um I’ve been able to ah bring many of the things that I’ve learned, tools and disciplines, if you will, ah into into ministry. So from the from the military to the marketplace to ministry. And so I retired just a few years ago. I started as an enlisted soldier and went through ROTC, Wright State University graduate…

Rich Birch — Very cool.

Yolanda Stewart — …and um retired as a lieutenant colonel 2015.

Rich Birch — Very cool. Well, you know, I’ve said in other contexts that I really do believe the U.S. military is the the greatest leadership development organization in the world, maybe outside of the church, but like doing amazing work, developing leaders. And it’s a, you know, it’s a real just incredible, you know, just a fertile leadership development kind of engine. And so I’d love to explore that a little bit today and, and talk about how, you know, and learn a little bit about how that journey from, um you know, the military to the marketplace, ultimately to ministry, how you brought some of those decisions along, maybe take us back to when you first joined the team and you were, you know, in that at Mosaic. When you compared the the kind of decisions that were being made, maybe in the military versus the decisions you were making at the church, how did they compare? How were they similar, different? You know, how did they, you know, how did that all fit together?

Yolanda Stewart — It’s very different. I will tell you.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I can imagine.

Yolanda Stewart — The thing that stood out, and and our church was, the staff was very young and very small, was very small ah staff when I came on board. But it was very different in terms of how decisions were made. And what what stood out to me was that there was no ah real framework. It was, it was emotional. It was ah perhaps, um ah you know, opportunistic maybe. You know, and ah it it just, it it made for a very frustrating process for me, having come from an organization that is very structured in how we make decisions.

Rich Birch — Right. Yes.

Yolanda Stewart — And and so that really stood out to me that, hey, this is an emotional decision. It’s not a well thought-out decision. It’s spontaneous. Fly by the seat of the pants, last minute, you know?

Rich Birch — Right, right.

Yolanda Stewart — And it resulted in a lot of of frustration…

Rich Birch — Yep.

Yolanda Stewart — …wasted resources, missing the objective, repeating the same mistakes over and over again. And so, yeah, that stood out to me. Very, very different than what I come from.

Rich Birch — Yeah, well, that I think you’ve described, and this is why I’m excited that you’re on the podcast today. You’ve described a lot of churches. That’s where a lot of us are at. We’re in this kind of, like you’re saying, you know emotional, opportunistic. We just kind of, um there’s like a “ready, fire, aim” you know, kind of mentality. Let’s just go.

Yolanda Stewart — Yeah.

Rich Birch — And, you know, we could, we might understand at a theoretical level, yeah, we need to have some sort of framework. Help me think through when you kind of started thinking about, hey, we’ve got to bring a framework here to make these decisions. How did those conversations go? What did were some of those initial kind of conversations to say, hey, we’re going to try to build a framework here for making decisions? Take us through that.

Yolanda Stewart — And that’s a great question. Yes, it makes sense. um I will tell you just just a little insert in here. Coming from the military, going to the marketplace, and then coming to ministry, boy, each of those were were culture cultural differences that really, really stretched me as a leader.

Yolanda Stewart — And so in in ministry, um because of just the mindset of ministry, it was it was a challenge for me to remind myself, these are not soldiers. And, you know, they’ve come from so many different backgrounds that I needed to take my time. I needed to throttle myself, if you will, and change my perspective and my approach.

Yolanda Stewart — So I didn’t do it right the first time, you know, first you know because in my mind, I was the I just that it was the wrong approach. And with the help of the Holy Spirit, and I’m just telling you, the Holy Spirit is underrated. But with the Holy Spirit, it’s like, it’s not what you say, Yolanda. And it’s not that what you bring to the table isn’t valuable and meaningful and and suitable for this organization. You have to you have to deliver it better.

Yolanda Stewart — And so once I worked through that leadership lesson, they were very receptive when I offered…offer. Not, let me tell you what you need to do to be better. It was like, hey, this is a tool that I’ve used in the marketplace. They were amazed. They thought, does everybody in the military make decisions like this? Well no, but listen I got wind of this tool many many years ago and I thought, hey, this works. And so I used it in the marketplace. And so I offered. And, um, pastor was very receptive, very receptive. The staff was very receptive. And to this day, and that was several years ago, Rich, to this day, I smile on the inside when I hear a staff member refer to a course of action, which is, you know, elements of the decision-making model that we’ll talk about.

Rich Birch — So good.

Yolanda Stewart — But so they were very receptive. And, I was able to do a presentation to the entire staff and and all the pastors came as well. And yeah, that’s how we navigated it. I offered it, and then they accepted my offer.

Rich Birch — Love it. Yeah. Yeah, that’s great. Well, that that’s great coaching there even um and um I want to make sure we dive into the the actual framework here for a second, but I think it’s good to pause and even just talk about how how you ended up kind of rolling this out. That’s a great insight for us, kind of regardless of what we’re trying to come with as from the second seat or executive pastor, you know we’re not necessarily the lead or not the lead pastor. And so we’re trying to, to offer help and assistance in a way that, you know, that is seen as help, not like, Hey, we’re trying to come down on you and, and clip your wings or whatever.

Rich Birch — Well, talk us through the framework, help us understand ah what what is this framework that you’ve, you’ve installed that has been so helpful?

Yolanda Stewart — Yes, it’s my privilege. And I did prepare a PDF…

Rich Birch — Perfect.

Yolanda Stewart — …that you’ll be able to make available to to your listeners.

Rich Birch — Yeah, we’ll link to that in the show notes for sure.

Yolanda Stewart — One hundred percent. So, so I call it, and this is, this is something that is so ingrained in me. It’s not like I, I pull my sheet out, you know…

Rich Birch — Right.

Yolanda Stewart — …but I did my best to capture it on paper because this is just what I do. I just, you know, it’s second nature to me now. But I call it Define, Discern, and Decide.

Rich Birch — Okay.

Yolanda Stewart — And and I what I did was I, um this tool is inspired by ah the military decision-making model that I adopted from an infantry handbook, mind you.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Yolanda Stewart — I was a medical service corps officer and so they we heal them. That’s kind of just what we say in the army. But I got wind of this and and what I did was I modified it into three steps.

Yolanda Stewart — Essentially, the first step is to clearly define your your problem or your objective. And you can’t sleep on this step, Rich, because it’s anchor for the whole ah process of making a good decision. And if you’re not clear on your objective, then you risk wasting resources, missing you know the the intent of the whole conversation, if you will, hold the whole collaboration, if your objective is not clear. So you’ve got to ah do the work to, take your time, not rush through it.

Rich Birch — So good.

Yolanda Stewart — You’ve got to clearly define the objective. And the the second step that that I lay out there in the in the document that I prepared for your listeners is to clearly define the non-negotiables. Because sometimes, and this is from experience, too often, one, if you don’t clearly define the objective, and if you don’t, secondly, clearly outline the non-negotiables, then you run the risk of, you know, collaborating and getting all excited about things that your pastor is like, we’re not doing that.

Rich Birch — Right.

Yolanda Stewart — We’re we’re not doing that.

Rich Birch — Right. Yes.

Yolanda Stewart — Now you’re frustrated because you didn’t consider what we call, and and they’ve adopted this term in in ministry at Mosaic, but we call it the commander’s intent. That’s what we call it in the military. So so you’ve got to know your pastor. You’ve got to know what has your pastor established ah that are non-negotiables or what is the ministry culture that should function as guardrails or boundaries, if you will, so that your collaboration is within the confines of the boundary that either your pastor has set or the culture has established. Does that make sense?

Rich Birch — Oh, that makes that makes total sense. I’m familiar with the commander’s intent idea, but I think that’s really good to early on, why is that immediately after the kind of the problem? So clearly understanding the problem and then next clearly identifying non-negotiables. Why what’s the interplay between those two? Why is that so important right up front?

Yolanda Stewart — Right up front, it’s important because it sets the the the the restrictions, the guardrails, the boundaries.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Yolanda Stewart — If you start outside of the boundaries, you’re never…

Rich Birch — Right.

Yolanda Stewart — …going to make the the type of decisions efficiently without going back and and redoing and going back and redoing, if you don’t start with those two keys. If you don’t start with clearly defining the objective or defining the problem…

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Yolanda Stewart — …and if you don’t, um then establish what those or identify, because they’re already established, but identify those non-negotiables, you’ve already started on the wrong foot.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Yolanda Stewart — Does it make sense?

Rich Birch — Makes sense. Total sense. Yep, absolutely. For sure.

Yolanda Stewart — Yeah, and so then from there, and let me just go back just for one micro moment to talk about the non-negotiables and talk about the importance of knowing your leader. Discernment is important at all three steps. And also just, you know, discernment, not just from the standpoint of your experience, what the pastor has said, um what the culture dictates, but what is Holy Spirit saying?

Rich Birch — Very good. Very good.

Yolanda Stewart — And and and I am I am sold on the necessity of the Holy Spirit.

Rich Birch — Yeah that, which is good. That’s good.

Yolanda Stewart — I’m entrenched. It’s too late to change my mind now, you know.

Rich Birch — Well, and this this, I’d love to double click on this because this will actually, you’re pre-thinking a question that’s bubbling in the back of my head, which is, I think that there can be a really beautiful coexistence of a fairly defined process, not rigid, but defined process, while at the same time, a high value on pursuing what the Holy Spirit wants to do and holding those two in harmony. I think sometimes we think, or there may be leaders who think that those are in opposed to each other.

Rich Birch — Maybe talk to a leader who who is saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m all in on the Holy Spirit, but why do if I’m all in on the Holy Spirit, why do I need to do all this other stuff? Why do I need to have this? You know, how do those two kind of coexist together?

Yolanda Stewart — That’s so that’s such a great question. It it made me think, immediately, when you began to elaborate on that question, I thought about a physician. Okay, a physician at spirit field. He still needed to go to school.

Rich Birch — That’s good. That’s good. Yep.

Yolanda Stewart — And he had to garner the knowledge, the education that was necessary for him to perform that function. And so don’t negate the the the education that a physician and the continuing education necessary for that physician to achieve the objective.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Yolanda Stewart — What the Holy Spirit does is he’s able to ah be the governor how that education is applied, how, what you do, how you do it, and leverage all that you have experienced by way of education, by way of practice and, and, and, and so on and so forth to achieve something far more than just the, the, the tangible, the, you know, the physical, you understand?

Yolanda Stewart — And so for me, I am, I am a spirit-filled Christ follower that have been called to leadership. They’re not I’m not two different people. And for me to think that I can function in excellence and please the Lord in a place where I have to choose whether I’m going to apply the Holy Spirit, give Holy Spirit access, give Holy Spirit influence, it makes absolutely, I can’t even make sense of it. It’s like, I need the Holy Spirit and I want, and I invite him to, to, to partner with me. I bring something to the table. I bring education. I bring my due diligence. I bring my experience.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

Yolanda Stewart — And what I’m asking Holy Spirit to do is to leverage, do what only you can do…

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Yolanda Stewart — …you know, that is bigger than me.

Rich Birch — Yeah, 100%.

Yolanda Stewart — But i’m not, and so what we do, Rich, sometimes is we idolize our intelligence so much so that we diminish the necessity of the Holy Spirit.

Rich Birch — So good. So good.

Yolanda Stewart — You understand?

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great. So good.

Yolanda Stewart — I don’t know if I answered your question.

Rich Birch — No, you did. Absolutely. No, that was super helpful. That’s that’s great. Okay. So I understand kind of commander’s intent, clearly identify the non-negotiables. Then what’s the next step in in the process? Then I want to ask a couple kind of follow-up questions.

Yolanda Stewart — Sure. And then the the final step is to begin developing the courses of action.

Rich Birch — Okay.

Yolanda Stewart — And so I do go into um more detail on the document that the tool I’ll refer to. There’s some key identifying, um excuse me, key considerations and and ah ah guiding questions that serve as just, you know, some good insight for a person that is new to this process.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Yolanda Stewart — I kind of do them in my head and sometimes I will capture them on the agenda and the in the the tool that I’m using when I’m leading a meeting or leading a collaboration, but it’s develop the courses of action. And my encouragement is always, and I’ve learned this from the process, is having more than one course of action is crucial.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Yolanda Stewart — And so I always encourage three, but always more than two, more than one, excuse me.

Rich Birch — More than one.

Yolanda Stewart — Three ideally, but more than one, because it’ll stretch you. It’ll cause you to, it’ll force you to think outside of the box, be innovative, not get caught in this rut of this is what we’ve always done. So you, you know, you’re afraid to do new things. And that collaboration of, ah that takes place when you’re developing the courses of action. When you invite key people to the table, In collaboration, one of our core values at Mosaic is collaboration.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Yolanda Stewart — The tagline to that is we refuse to do it alone.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

Yolanda Stewart — When you collaborate, you get access to people’s experience, you get their buy-in, and you get to leverage their insight and their innovation to help you make a good decision. But developing that course, the three courses of action, ideally three, more than one always, is is going to give you the opportunity to stretch, give you the opportunity to weigh the the pros and the cons and help you go to this through this, excuse me, critical thinking process. So when it’s all done, you’re able to identify, hey, we thought that was a good idea or a great course of action until we developed or identified the pros and the cons. And do they ah speak well to the non-negotiables? Do they marry with the commander’s intent? So now you’re able to go through these processes of of elimination. And when it’s all said and done, you’re able to land on either one course of action…

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Yolanda Stewart — …or an amalgamation of the three to make a decision.

Rich Birch — Right. Yeah. Oh, I love that. And man, I think that that right there is gold. I think so many times we get caught in binary thinking as church leaders. It’s like, well, we’re either going to do this or that. I love the idea of let’s force to three, or maybe more even, to try to get us to think outside the box, even if it’s at the front end seems like that’s a ridiculous, that third option is ridiculous, but let’s actually go down the course, figure it out, pull it apart. And and we might you might find some gold there that we can then apply ah you know, even to some of the others. That’s that’s fantastic.

Rich Birch — So as you’ve run this process multiple times and helped you make some decisions, could you give me an example of how this process helped you make a clearer decision that that felt like hey, we’re we’re not just reacting, we’re we’re making a better kind of long-term, you know not emotional, not necessarily opportunistic, although it it may have emotions and opportunity involved in it. But how do, give me an example of of something that you feel like, hey, this process helped make better at Mosaic.

Yolanda Stewart — Oh, that’s so good. Well, I’m in it right now.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Yolanda Stewart — And this is the the second iteration, by the way. And so so Mosaic, I’ll just preface my my example with this: Mosaic grew exponentially over the last few years.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Yolanda Stewart — And when I ah ah came to Mosaic, I want to tell you that we were about 150 people.

Rich Birch — Wow.

Yolanda Stewart — We have since grown to, I think we’re around about 2,300 regular average weekly attenders.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Yolanda Stewart — That that include…

Rich Birch — That’s amazing. That’s huge growth.

Yolanda Stewart — Yeah. And that includes around 600 or so children.

Rich Birch — Yep.

And oh there there were um areas where it’s like we we crafted, I say we, but it predated me, but we’ve crafted these narratives that we weren’t quite achieving them. So let me say say use this as an example. So our our vision mission statement, if you will, was we make disciples and we release ministers. And so here I come along and I say, well, how? How are we making disciples?

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Yolanda Stewart — And um the answer was inadequate because the answer was we do it through connect groups. And so then here I am with myself, you know, coming along and being the challenge to to just provoke us, right?

Yolanda Stewart — I said, okay, if if if there’s if there’s a very low expectation for connect group leaders. If anyone can be a connect group leader, if you’ve been saved 20 minutes, you can be a connect group leader. Then tell me how a baby Christian who is just motivated to lead a group can be called a disciple-maker, when we have no way of of certainty that they’ve been, well, we do, but when they’ve not been discipled.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

Yolanda Stewart — And so I said, we need to do better. So let’s come to the table and let’s talk about what we can do to raise the level of expectation, rather raise the standard for what it looks like to be a group leader. And then let’s build what I call a transformational leadership pipeline.

Rich Birch —That’s good.

Yolanda Stewart — Let’s build a real process, a framework that at the end of it, we’ve got to make sure it’s simple because that’s our pastor. He’s like, look, don’t complicate stuff to where now it’s a deterrent, right?

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Yolanda Stewart — But I’m okay with it being robust enough to be effective, but it can’t be too too robust to be a deterrent for people. But I said, let’s build framework that’s simple, measurable, and meaningful so that at the end of the day, we can stand back and say, okay, we truly do…

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Yolanda Stewart — …make disciples and release ministers. Here’s the framework that we do that. Here’s the process. It’s measurable. There’s accountability in there.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Yolanda Stewart — There is benchmarks, if you will. It’s simple and achievable and effective. And so anyway, I’m in the process. And and this, I said, it’s the second iteration. We’ve already made some progress, but we’re not done yet.

Rich Birch — Okay.

Yolanda Stewart — But the culture that we’re in, I had to give my pastor time to to digest where I had already gotten us to.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Yolanda Stewart — And so now he’s at the place where because of my approach and you’ve got to be humble, Rich, when you’re bringing ideas that is going to shift the whole paradigm of a ministry.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Yolanda Stewart — If you come in—I learned this the hard way—if you come in with the wrong approach, it could take years for you to achieve a good momentum…

Rich Birch — that’s good

Yolanda Stewart — …you know, unnecessary delay because your approach your approach was wrong. And so I’m in the middle of taking a team of leaders that I invited to the table and we have identified our objective. Our objective is to establish a transformational leadership pipeline…

Rich Birch — That’s so good.

Yolanda Stewart — …that we can roll out to group leaders and group coaches that when they are gone through this process, it’s not a transactional process, it’s a transformational process. It can’t be classroom setting.

Rich Birch — Right.

Yolanda Stewart — So we we are identifying, we identified the objective and you’ve got to do one at a time, but we identified the objective. Now we’re putting the meat on the bones…

Rich Birch — Love it.

Yolanda Stewart — …and and what I call building the gooey center…

Rich Birch — [laughs]

Yolanda Stewart — …building the gooey center…

Rich Birch — So good.

Yolanda Stewart — …so at the end of it all, we will have a framework that we have gone through this process of different courses of action and we will land on what we know is is effective, simple, measurable, and transformational.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. Well, when you think about these steps, is there one of them that seems to be the place that things get stuck? Is it that it’s like, or or is there a common pothole with one of them that, man, we want to make sure we avoid as we think about ah these these three steps?

Yolanda Stewart — It’s step number one.

Rich Birch — Right, okay. Not being clear on what the problem is we’re trying to solve.

Yolanda Stewart — It’s not being clear on what…

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Yolanda Stewart — …because it becomes emotional.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Yolanda Stewart — And you you’ve got to focus on the objective that you are trying to achieve or the problem that you’re aiming to solve, not what you feel or what you’re experiencing.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. Yeah, I can see that.

Yolanda Stewart — So so that seems to be a common pothole where people get stuck.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s…

Yolanda Stewart — I’ve been stuck there before.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah. Well, no, I can see that. Or you get it’s that whole, know, you’ve you’ve climbed up the ladder and realized the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall. It’s like we’re solving a problem and get halfway there and you realize, oh, this isn’t actually the right problem to be solving. That, you know, that makes that makes a lot of sense.

Rich Birch — Well, when you think, let’s, you know, let’s think I’m maybe an executive pastor or a lead pastor that’s leading it, that’s listening in today. And they’re thinking about, Ooo there’s a decision coming up. What advice would you give them for some initial steps to try to help build a stronger alignment around maybe even understanding what that problem is? If the first if step one is the critical piece of the puzzle, how can what what advice would you give to us on defining the problems that we should even push through a process like this? How how do you how do you help us help us think through what that could look like for us?

Yolanda Stewart — That’s such a great question, Rich. Collaboration. Invite the right people to the table.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Yolanda Stewart — That’s my advice. I mentioned that I started my military career as a private. If you know anything about the military, the private is the voiceless person, right? So we’re polishing pipes and doing, you know, police calling, picking up trash and things. But what I learned as a sergeant and what I learned as a cadet and what I learned as a colonel a commander, is that that private is the key to my success.

Rich Birch — Oh, that’s good.

Yolanda Stewart — I’m the ideator. I am the person, you know, at certain levels of leadership. Sometimes my head is is, you know, at the 30,000 foot perspective. And like I’m not aware that the the the real challenges are, you know, fill in the blank because I’m not at the execution level.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good

Yolanda Stewart — And if you don’t invite the right people to the table, then you risk, you know, the the the you you forfeit the the the beauty of their contribution and the importance of of its influence to the outcome.

Rich Birch — No, that’s good.

Yolanda Stewart — And so my my encouragement to leaders is humble yourself, humble yourself exclamation. And look around. Refuse to do it alone. Leverage the experience, the perspective…

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Yolanda Stewart — …of the folks who are going to be most impacted by the decision that you’re about to make. Leverage the the insight of the people who are going to be expected to execute, communicate, coordinate, if you will, the decision that you’re about to make. Invite them to the table…

Rich Birch — That’s so good.

Yolanda Stewart — …so that they can get buy-in, you can get their buy-in, and you can get the benefit of their experience and their perspective. So that would be my advice.

Rich Birch — Well, Yolanda, this has been great. I can see why God is using your leadership at at Mosaic. This has been a rich conversation today. I really appreciate this. And thank you for this handout. Super helpful for ah for people. As we’re kind of coming to land the plane, anything else you’d ah you’d like to share with us today?

Yolanda Stewart — Yes, and and I want to circle back because I think, you know, what one of the things that we say at Mosaic is your spirituality is your greatest asset. And um sometimes, especially leaders at the level that I’m leading at, sometimes they come from the marketplace and they have been indoctrinated by the culture of of the secular, you know, market, if you will. And I want to just say, as as spiritual leaders, we cannot lose sight…

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Yolanda Stewart — …of the importance of our spirituality being the greatest influence in all of the things that we do, especially our leadership. We are being trusted to lead. We have been positioned and assigned to lead. And if we choose to do it independent of, of total dependency on the help of the Holy Spirit and our spirituality, we risk many of the, the, the what I think are counter-kingdom, counter-kingdom consequences ah in church because leaders bring secular culture into the church and and and leverage those types of things to be leaders. And we lose lose sight of servant leadership, what that really looks like.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

Yolanda Stewart — And become transactional leaders, you know, disconnected versus transformational leaders.

Rich Birch — So good.

Yolanda Stewart — You know, people are used as tools and we ah we exploit people. And this just mindset from the secular world, my my encouragement would be just be careful as a leader. Don’t forget that your spirituality is your greatest asset. Bring it to the table every time, even when you’re bringing correction. You know, you should bring a basket of fruit. Galatians 2 conversations, the hard ones, you know, bring the basket of fruit and don’t lose sight that you are a disciple-maker.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good.

Yolanda Stewart — Even when you’re having the hard conversations to bring corrections. So there’s good insight from the secular market. But we must not allow the secular market to influence our dependency on our spirituality to lead God’s people.

Rich Birch — Well, this has been fantastic. So helpful today. First, just want to honor you for your service. Thank you so much for what you’ve done in the military and then how you’ve brought this with such wisdom and insight and applied that to Mosaic. It’s just been fantastic. If people want to connect with the church or with you, how do how do we do that? Where can we point them online to connect with the church?

Yolanda Stewart — Yes, mosaicchurch.us is how you find us. And we are in the process of of uploading some of these tools that we are developing in-house.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Yolanda Stewart — And um I’m looking forward to the opportunity for those things to be available online as well. But just to hear some messages and just to get some inspiration, that’s how you can find us online.

Rich Birch — Love it. Great. We’ll link to that in the show notes. Thanks so much, Yolanda. I appreciate you being here today.

Yolanda Stewart — Rich, thank you so much. Bye-bye now.

You’re not alone. Many churches hope for big impact at Christmas but end up seeing minimal growth, and it’s not because your people don’t care or your services aren’t good enough.

In this final installment of our 3-part summer series on planning for Christmas, Rich Birch unpacks the real reasons why churches miss the mark—and how to avoid them. If you’re tired of putting in effort only to feel like Christmas could’ve reached more people, this episode is for you.

Inside today’s conversation:

You’re Skipping Steps
Sending one email or making a single announcement doesn’t move the needle. Rich shares how churches unintentionally undercut their invite efforts by doing only pieces of the plan—and how you can fix it.

You Need a Full System, Not Just Hard Work
More energy doesn’t automatically mean more guests. Rich explains how having a proven, start-to-finish invite system is more effective than just adding to your team’s to-do list.

Lukewarm Culture Doesn’t Spark Growth
If you aren’t passionate and consistent about inviting people, your congregation won’t be either. Learn why clear, repeated messaging builds the kind of momentum that leads to overflowing Christmas services.

Repetition Is Not the Problem—It’s the Plan
Don’t be afraid to sound like a broken record. Great churches aren’t afraid to repeat the invite over and over again in a clear, practical way.

This is part 3 of a special 3-part series designed to help your church plan ahead for Christmas—starting in the summer.
Missed the first two episodes? Catch up here:

Part 1: Why Christmas Can Still Be the Biggest Service of the Year At Your Church

Part 2: 3 Churches That Leveraged Christmas Well … and What You Should Copy This Year

Ready to Build Your Most Invitable Christmas Ever?
It’s time to stop guessing and start planning with confidence. Join the brand-new:

A done-with-you, 8-session coaching cohort designed to help your church:

Use code PODCAST at checkout to save $500.
Space is limited. Don’t wait.

Join now at helpchurchleaders.com/christmasinviteaccelerator

Let’s make this your most impactful Christmas ever.

Welcome to the unSeminary podcast. Today we’re talking with Devin Goins, Executive Pastor of Strategic Development at Biltmore Church in western North Carolina, one of the fastest-growing churches in the country.

Is your church growing but you’re struggling to keep your team aligned and rowing in the same direction? Tune in as Devin outlines a simple yet powerful diagnostic tool that helps churches evaluate and improve staff alignment and organizational health.

Download Biltmore Church’s red, yellow and green zone framework, and follow along with what they are doing at @biltmorechurch and @pastorbrucefrank.

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!

Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: SermonDone

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Rich Birch — Well, hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. Really looking forward to today’s conversation. We are really talking about how we work together, what do we do as a team to kind of keep us focused and rowing in the same direction? I know. Listen, friends, if we’re honest, all of us are wrestling with this and need help in this area.

Rich Birch — And so we’ve got a real expert on the phone today on the call the phone whatever man 1990 called and wants their podcast back. We’ve got Devin Goins with us. he’s in an incredible church, Biltmore Church, a multi-site church in western North Carolina with seven locations, if I can count correctly, maybe eight with another one, a Spanish location service online. They’ve repeatedly been on the fastest growing church list in the country. He serves as the executive pastor of strategic development. That’s a fantastic title. Devin, welcome to the show.

Devin Goins — Thanks. Thanks. Yeah. My title, I think, has been voted repeatedly, is most likely to be created by AI, is what I’ve been told. So, for sure.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love it. That that’s a normal – I’ve joked in, in other contexts that, you know, leading in a fast growing multi-site church. I was like, we should just stop having titles because it’s like constantly changing, you know, there’s always new things coming.

Devin Goins — They’re buzzwords.

Rich Birch — Tell me about the church. Kind of tell us a little bit about Biltmore. Give us some context. Talk talk about that.

Devin Goins — Yeah. So a regional multi-site church, we’ve got seven campuses, including the Spanish campus, but about to be number eight is under construction.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Devin Goins — Number nine is kind of in the pipeline a little bit.

Rich Birch — Fantastic.

Devin Goins — So we’re building that that as we speak. And so yeah, just a day to day kind of feel like my, my job, even though it sounds like AI what we found is that functionally, our lead pastor decides the what. And along with our executive team, I try to help with the with the how each and every week.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Devin Goins — And so it’s been growing quite a bit and very thankful to our leadership for that. And just try to steward that the best we can. Western North Carolina is very diverse in terms of some of its, you know, political leanings. You got high, high views on either side, particularly with the town that we’re in near Asheville. And so we’re just very excited to continue to be able to serve this community each and every week.

Rich Birch — So good. You know, I there’s a lot I want to dig into today, but I’m sure leading in your context, I love that you’re, you know, launching another campus, thinking about the one beyond that, you’re growing church. You’re trying to you’re leading at the—I’ve talked about this in other contexts as well—leading at the intersection of vision and execution. Hey, how do we make this stuff happen? When you think about kind of leadership challenges that you’re facing that kind of been bubbling up, what are some of the things that that you know that you see you’re kind of dealing with these days?

Devin Goins — Yeah. Well, I think with growth obviously comes complexity. We hear that a lot. And so how do you keep people aligned with that? I think oftentimes we think that we’re growing because of something. And so we don’t we sometimes to be resistant to change in that because we think, hey, this growth is happening for some reason. Why would we want to do anything to change that? And the reality is, if you’re growing, that’s when you need to be changing.

Devin Goins — And so I’m thankful to be able to serve our lead pastor, Bruce Frank – one of the hardest workers I know. He’s amazing. He is great at navigating through change with people. And so we’re just seeing that is that, you know, we aren’t content with the status quo, with, we believe that God’s called us to more. And so, you know, day to day, I think one of the things that we’re looking at is our lids. I’m sure that y’all have covered many times on the show parking, kids, and worship are lids. And so I do a lot of research of going, hey, not only where are we now, but y’all y’all know and your listeners know that there’s cadences for the week and for the year that you’re going to have. And so just because you have capacity in June doesn’t mean necessarily you’re going to have capacity in February.

Rich Birch — Right.

Devin Goins — And so I try to be proactive with that and kind of highlight both hot spots and some cold spots of where we could potentially improve.

Rich Birch — Yeah that’s cool. There’s a, man, there’s a lot there. We might come back to that, you know that lids conversation because there’s definitely something there on the physical side. But when it comes to kind of managing your people, managing the team, you know, there’s the, the big ideas of like, okay, we want to do these things, but then we’ve got to actually then get people to do that. Like we gotta move people through that. What are you learning on that front about managing your people, helping them kind of think through managing change in their in their in their work, in their lives.

Devin Goins — Yeah. Yeah. So I think you’ve got to pay attention to the layers of your organization. And I think that sometimes we forget the last layer. And that’s the staff to the volunteers. And so you have got to communicate something so clearly up at the top that your leadership tier, that your executive tier is sick of talking about it. They’re sick of hearing about it. Because that’s when it’s going to start going down into, you know, your coordinators, into your specialists that are actually doing things on staff.

Devin Goins — But then, you know, we made a decision recently that affected one of our positions and, the volunteers that they were over. And I actually sat in on one of their huddles and, and I got to hear their take and how they were explaining the decision that we made in a room on a whiteboard, how they were having to actually explain it to these volunteers, and it affected them personally. And so I’m a big fan of, you don’t want to stay down there but get as far in the ground level as you can. I, last Sunday went to a mature adults group that we have at the church, and I just said, hey, can I sit? And they, you know, were poking jokes at me the entire time, but I got to see, you know, on boots on the ground, what are things like. So obviously saturating “the why”. The bigger you get, the longer runway you have to have. But some people are successful at first at, you know, being a church that has a one-year-runway and they have success because they’re agile. But then you add locations, you add staff, and you have to be more and more intentional with that.

Devin Goins — And so now that we’re at, you know, seven about to be eight campuses, we’re really trying. We don’t want to lose the ability to move quickly, but we we need to make sure that we move effectively and that that vision drips all the way down, not just to our staff, but to our volunteers as well.

Rich Birch — Yeah. So good. I love your clear thinking on that. That’s, that’s fantastic. You’ve, I’ve seen a framework that you use internally. You call it red zones, yellow zones, green zones. Can you talk us through what these zones are first and then where where did this idea come from? Kind of give us…

Devin Goins — Yeah. Yeah.

Rich Birch — …the the germ of it. Where where did all this come from.

Devin Goins — Yeah. So these zones are based on the scope of care. and so the scope of care, if you’re in the red zone, that means you’re highly stressed or you’re highly insecure. We’re talking about staff members here. Your scope of care tends to be yourself or themselves if we’re talking about staff members.

Devin Goins — And then if they’re moderately stressed and this is what I see with a whole lot of churches, whether they’re growing or shrinking, is that they have a lot of people that are in the yellow zone. And that’s whenever they start thinking about, not just themselves, they’re beyond that, but they’re thinking primarily about, their team. If you’re a multi-site church, then you’re starting to think about your campus. Not that there’s ever any of that going on.

Devin Goins — But, and then finally, if you’re in the green zone, which means you’re low stress, high security, high vision, then you’re going to be thinking about the entire church, and that’s going to be your scope of care. And what we found is that the more people you can have, you aren’t going to have everybody in the green zone. But the more is an executive pastor or leadership team that you can move into that green zone, or at least out of the red zone, we really want them in the green zone. The more that you can have in there, you don’t have a high chance of high alignment in your church.

Devin Goins — Moderate alignment happens because of the teams and all that when it’s in the yellow zone. But then low alignment happens when you have a whole lot of people that are in that red zone. And so we have this kind of framework that we use, and it helps us be able to identify, because we don’t want our people in the red zone. That’s not beneficial to them. That’s not beneficial to the church. And so it gives us a chance to pastor them through. And there’s many reasons for that.

Devin Goins — The kind of origin of it. I’ve been on staff now for, for 12 years, and I started as the communications director. And with the communications team, we had just gone multi-site when I got here. Our lead pastor, Bruce Frank, Carl Sutherland, our creative pastor – they had managed all the, like, really tough, like modernizing the worship service. What’s this idea of multi-site? And you’re given to all those things. And they had done that great. And we were experiencing a lot of growth because of that. It was being, rewarded, I think, for their efforts.

Devin Goins — But as the comms guy, I was starting to see under the surface. If you get nothing from this podcast, talk to your comms guy, because they’re going to see the underbelly of what is working. And there’s areas that were handling the stress very well. And there’s also areas that we’re still very much in that like one site church, or the number that we were, that we’re struggling to to kind of adapt to the new reality.

Rich Birch — I, I love this. Friends, a little editorial note. The thing I love that you’ve done here—not surprising; you come from a comms background—you’ve tried to put to a a fairly simple, you know, red, yellow, green, on a complex and important topic. And that clarification, man, I can see how that would help drive internal. Because you have to get common language and understanding first before you can get that kind of alignment. So let’s talk about red zone. How do you identify that teammates, areas, departments are in the red zone. What’s does that look like to you? Give me some examples of that.

Devin Goins — Absolutely. And, you know, I think it’s important to think through. This doesn’t mean an employee is a bad employee. I’ll kind of share a story about me two years ago when I was in the red zone. But it does mean that there’s a there’s something not working right that needs to be handled. So signs that we see… Are these people afraid or nervous in meetings with their supervisor. Whenever they have that one on one, or they always kind of shrinking away? Are they afraid that something, did I do something wrong? Things like that. They generally have an apathy towards team or organizational goals. Hey, we’re doing this whole new initiative and it’s going to be great. And we’re going to see, you know, this many baptisms. Hopefully next year is fruit of it. And they’re just apathetic towards it. But really what what kind of sums it up is their first thought or your first thought may be when something is presented or implemented. Hey how does this affect me? How does this affect me? What what is my, what what is the cost that I’m going to have with this?

Devin Goins — Now again, we can easily go, hey, that means that somebody is, you know, a bad employee or in the wrong seat. Oftentimes, it’s an outside life stressor. And so, you know, for me, two years ago, my, my wife and I suffered a devastating miscarriage. It was something that I pastored some people through that before. But it wasn’t something that I thought that we were going to navigate ourselves. And so during that time, I was definitely in that red zone thinking. Hey, we got this great new, you know, project, and we’re rolling out this program, and I’m sitting there doing, man, I’m grieving. And I’ve also got a grieving wife, and we’re trying to grieve together but separate in timelines that that put us where I was thinking about myself. It doesn’t mean it’s bad, but it is something that we need to handle.

Devin Goins — A couple other things that can lead to that. I’ll put this on our tier and executive pastors and leadership. Sometimes it’s a lack of clear vision and strategy and people not consistently hearing the why or the how. So it’s very important that we don’t go, you’re in the red zone. You’re bad. how do we handle this? How do you fix this? We need to look in the mirror and go, hey, are we actually consistently given that that how and why?

Devin Goins — The other thing is that it could be consistent redlining and burnout, possibly due to being in the wrong seat. Burnout is interesting. You can fake it for a while. But if you’re in the wrong seat and you know it, and you’ve got that imposter syndrome for for, you know, day after day, week after week, eventually it’s going to catch up to you.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so true.

Devin Goins — And so we can see we can see that. So, and then we’ve got solutions just to get out of the red zone, obviously meeting with a counselor. That’s what I had to do, processing for the grief. Having honest conversations with a supervisor. I feel like supervisors know sometimes you’re in the wrong seat, but they’re waiting for you to be able to be the one. And I’m not sure that’s best, but sometimes that happens to to identify it. So everyone loses when you’re in the wrong seat and everybody wins whenever you’re in the right seat. And then finally, I know it’s cliche, but you’ve got to saturate yourself in why you do what you do and who you serve. Ministry is the best job in the world when you remember that. But when the hustle and bustle gets there and you forget why, there is a lot of stress in these roles and there is not a whole lot of credit sometimes or reward, at least on this side of heaven. It can be the best job in the world, or it can be the worst job in the world, depending on how connected you are with that.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that. I think that you’re there’s a lot there, but your clear distinction around, the kind of core behavior or mindset of someone in the red zone is it’s very much about them.

Rich Birch — Everything – it’s… I’ve joked in other contexts, or not joked, I’ve said in other contexts there’s this idea of locus of control where it’s like, you know, external locus, internal locus of control. External locus of control people are always like: stuff happens to me. Everyone’s doing things to me. And that’s a, that’s a tough place to lead from for sure. So if, if that’s the red zone and then green zone is this idea of like, hey, I’m aligned with, like I’m thinking about the church. I’m thinking about the vision, the mission. I’m fully aligned with where we’re going. Explain the yellow zone to me. Help me understand where to… Because the two extremes I get, I get the like, oh, I’m super, you know, we all know that person where like, something happens and they’re like, oh my goodness. Or we know the person that’s strong in the line. What does the yellow zone look like?

Devin Goins — Yeah. So this one’s hidden often. But I would say that particularly in growing churches, is one of the most common areas that people are in. And the reason is, you’ve, you’ve had this growth where you’ve whether you’re shrinking or growing. It’s applying pressure. And, and usually unless you’re just in dire straits, you have friends with the people that you work with, the department that you’re in, the campus that you’re in. And so you don’t just go all the way down to thinking of me, but you also realize that their survival and kind of like this group mentality, this herd mentality that the herd is just your your area. And so one of the things that we see common and I see this all the time, is policies and procedures are often created in a vacuum that favors a team or a department. So I’ll pick on myself here a little bit again – comms guy. We started getting requests that were, you know, like 7 to 10 days out for like full fledged videos. And we’re like, hey, the only way we could do this is if I say, if I call my wife and say, hey, am I going to see you for the next, you know, 7 to 10 days, and that’s not that’s not good.

Devin Goins — So what we did, and it seems great on the surface, we said, hey, let’s create a policy and let’s create a procedure, but we’re going to create that procedure where it’s going to be a creative request form, a communications request form. And we’re going to put on there. You need to let us know this four weeks out in order for us to give you the deliverables. Now that seems great. And I’m high-fiving all of our you know, we’ve come up, we’ve had the great brainstorming ah meeting. But what we actually did there is we managed the symptom. We managed the symptom of getting things late. Well, when you actually dig into it, what was happening was we were growing at such a pace that smaller events were now big events because of their size. And so there was additional details that they needed to work through and they were waiting on their supervisors for. And so inadvertently, what I may have done is I may have put, if kids was waiting until, you know, ten days out, and they didn’t get their information, you know, ten days out.

Devin Goins — Now I’m putting them in a double bind in a no-win situation where I’ve created a policy that helps me, but it doesn’t help them. And so that that’s very easy to do. It’s very easy to go, hey, we need this tool. But this tool is really geared towards lessening my load as a department. And that’s that’s easy to do. It’s natural to do. But as the executive team, executive pastors and leadership, we have to fight against that. Another couple of signs that could help with that or show that is competition takes place with other departments for promotional awareness. So they’re trying to outcompete each other of, hey, I’ve got you know, if you’re VBS and your student camp are like at the same time, who can be louder to, you know, kind of get an awareness of those events. But the key thing that they see and you’ll see, this is the first thought when something new is presented or implemented, how will this impact my team?

Devin Goins — And so you’ll see this a little bit, something’s being revealed in an all staff meeting and there’s a text thread and it’s for, you know, that department. Hey, did you hear about this? How is this going to affect this? How is this? And you’re you’re bonding together, but you aren’t bonding together for the church. You’re you’re fighting for survival for for you. The thing that I will say, this is where the executive pastor, executive team can help with this. And so you can help look at organizational growth and scarcity of resources that can cause that. So you can look at that. Another thing that you can look at is look at inherited processes and goals. I call these, zombie processes. It’s a process that’s been there, and maybe a staff member is doing this… Oh, Rich, I, I got to tell you a story.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Devin Goins — I need to I need to tell her about this before this podcast airs. But, a couple of years ago, I was the comms guy, again, I kept going to our welcome desk throughout the week. And it was some of this great content. I think it was on like, spiritual warfare or something like that. And I think it’s like Billy Graham, good content. But the cover of it was like these angels and demons battling, and it just was not our brand. It was not anything, you know, that we would, we would want. And so I would go up and I would see it and I would take them and I would put them in the trash. I’m getting good content, but I’m like, I don’t know if this is approved. I don’t know where this is coming from. You know, all that. And then the next week I would come back to the desk and there was the same material again. And I’m like, okay, so I take it, I put it in the trash. Then it starts getting where I put it in the trash. The next day it’s back and I’m like, who is here? This is obviously a staff member. This is obviously somebody, you know, and so I go out to the lobby and I see one of one of our ladies that’s been on staff for many years, and she is so awesome and will run the play in for years upon years.

Devin Goins — And I see her with these things, with these pamphlets in her hands. And I’m like, hey, you know, are you the one that’s, you know, putting these out here? And she goes, yes, Devin, I am. And you would not believe how popular these things are. I put them down and they are gone the next day. And so I keep printing them out and doing all that. I’m like, oh, man.

Rich Birch — That’s amazing.

Devin Goins — So we had a talk and said, hey, can we modernize the cover? This is obviously, you know, went for there. But be careful, though, sometimes your most dedicated employees are doing these zombie processes. And then, you know, also just making sure that you don’t have competing goals and that you’re planning holistically with that. So…

Rich Birch — Right.

Devin Goins — …a couple of things just to get out of that: if the policy or anything primarily benefits only your team or department, you got to consider if that’s worth doing. Planning ahead and planning together, and then just aligning with a strategic plan we found has helped a lot with that.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. I love that. How did how has this impacted the kind of internal conversations, this framework. What does this look like operationally kind of on the ground.? Like what is this is it does this bubble up or people like, they give you a stamp and say or a sticker and you’re like, you’re in the red zone. You know, what’s that what’s that look like?

Devin Goins — Yeah. No, we definitely try to reward like, I’ve got a production director now that’s amazing. And he’s got a video background. And so he just filmed all of our videos for our adventure week, what we call our VBS, and they are amazing. And so I try to make a point of that to complement where, where we can, any sort of thing with that, to be able to say, hey, people really just when they know they’re doing a good job, you know what gets rewarded, gets repeated. And sometimes rewarded is just, you know, calling it out and saying it. So it’s that.

Devin Goins — I think it’s also, and this is the frustrating thing, is whenever something pops up, and I have situations right now where I want to go yellow zone, so, so fast because there’s a stress point that’s there. And so I’ll have an employee say, hey, this happened and this is against, you know, our policy. Can we, you know, gate this so it has to go through another approval process. And it’s frustrating, but to sit back and go, okay, let’s put ourselves in the other department shoes. What what are some of the pressures that they’re facing, and how can we go green zone thinking of going, what’s the stress behind all this and how can we work together for it? I’m not saying that we do that perfect. It annoys some of my employees sometimes because I think they want me to just come down with the hammer. But I think ultimately, when we’re all on the same team, it’s felt and we know that we can get further, faster.

Rich Birch — Yeah. That’s good. I like particularly your your conversation around policies there because you know, and I’ve, I’ve said in other context that policies are if your policy is just trying to you have a policy to try to avoid a conversation, then we really shouldn’t have that policy. You should just have the conversation. Like so using the example of like we’ve all lived, you have a very vivid example. Hey we need this video in x number of days, weeks, you know whatever. And it’s not, how do you actually solve that then? If we don’t have a policy, if we don’t say it’s four weeks, what do you functionally do to try to drive alignment? Have more conversation? Is that the goal?

Devin Goins — Yeah, yeah. I think the conversation has got to be key. I would say that sometimes we do a policy to avoid those conversations. And the other thing, whatever the structure is, whatever that tear down in your church from the lead pastor is they have got to be on the same page, and they have got to be willing to slow roll something until they get on the same page.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

Devin Goins — So I’m one of four executive pastors, and man, I’ve got some ideas that I think are just amazing. I think that they would push us forward. I think they would be great. And and to be honest, I’ve been given by our lead pastor some positional authority to be able to roll some of those out. But if I do that, and I don’t have my other three teammates on the same page…

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Devin Goins — …it’s probably not going to stick. And when something doesn’t stick that that trails off that that continues on in your organization, you start having questions like, hey, is this going to be another one of X, Y, and Z? I know we’re talking about it. I know Devin’s really excited about it, but I talked to my guy and and he didn’t know about it. Or he he’s got some questions about it. So that that second layer has got to be on the same page. And sometimes you gotta you’ll actually get there faster, being slower and waiting for everybody to come along to it, refining it. But you never want to put your teams where they’re against each other, and they don’t have the authority to solve it because their executive pastors upstream are not on the same page.

Devin Goins — So a commitment to that. We meet, quite a bit, and sometimes it feels long. But I know that whenever we, we exit that room, we’re on the same page, and we’re all going to be saying the same thing, and that’s important.

Rich Birch — Yeah. That’s great. My friend Jenni Catron talks about the fact that our cultures are not as good as we think they are. You know, the we as as senior leaders, we think, man, it’s great to work here. This is fantastic. But it’s actually not the case. You got to get out and talk to people. There’s some resonance here with that. I think there’s a similar issue around alignment. We’re probably not as aligned as we think we are. Kind of dig that out a little bit more. You know, it’s it’s this is an important issue for us to really own at the senior level. Help us understand that. Talk that talk that through a little bit.

Devin Goins — Yeah. No I think with alignment what we have to think through, one, I think that we believe that we can drift towards alignment. And sometimes we do say with the gospel we have this alignment so we should naturally, if we’re all Christ followers. And and the reality is nothing is not passive. It doesn’t it doesn’t happen. So I actually think alignment is is very spiritual. And I’ll take it from, from two angles. One, think about the Scripture in general. One of the main purposes of Scripture, I believe, is to align our life based off of biblical principles that we see in God’s Word, and biblical truths and the gospel. And so I think that you think of the word sanctification. That’s really just alignment of aligning your life personally. And so I think it is a spiritual concept that can have organizational stuff. The flip side is also true, is that I believe that that the devil knows that he can, if he can misalign, if he can use misalignment for a church, he can greatly reduce its effectiveness.

Devin Goins — So it’s not just this passive thing. A well-resourced church, you may go, man, I’m not a well resourced church, you know, X, Y, and Z. If you have a church building, if you have a congregation, if you’re meeting, you’re you’re well resourced by the world’s standards. You can make a difference with your resources. And so I believe the devil goes constantly and goes, hey, a way for me to minimize their effectiveness, I can’t tackle their resources, but I can make them much more inability to be able to manage those and reduce their effectiveness, because I can get, you know, departments against each other. And if I can make the enemy Fran from kids, as opposed to the devil, I’m gonna greatly reduce that church’s effectiveness as opposed to, being able to do that.

Rich Birch — That, Dude, that is so true. You know, I’m laughing. Not because it’s funny, but because it’s so true. Like, you know, we’ve we’ve seen that. It’s like, you know, we spend a lot of time talking about how we’re talking to each other rather than working on the thing that the mission that God’s given us. That’s that’s so fantastic. Well, maybe there’s a leader that’s listening in today and they think, man, my team, the people I work with, maybe me is, you know, shifting towards yellow to red. What’s like a step or two you think we could take to try to address that?

Devin Goins — Yeah. So I think a couple of things. If you are in positional authority, use that positional authority. We sometimes think of that as being a bad thing. And we should, you know, not not lead through that, but use that for good and remove bottlenecks or resource scarcity. If there’s something sometimes we’re guilty of trying to be good stewards and we order just enough of a product or a supply. But really what we’ve done downstream is we’ve made departments compete against each other for that. And then if somebody doesn’t return it and then there’s these battles. So the, the okay with, you know, trying to reduce that resource scarcity, any bottlenecks that you see also.

Devin Goins — Also, manage the calendar holistically. Just because it’s good doesn’t mean it’s best. And particularly if you are scaling these events and these things that you need to promote, they get bigger over time. So as you scale in terms of size, you may have to look at something and go, man, that was good, but is it best for right now? And then something that we touched on before is just continually highlight and reward, Green Zone thinkers. You know, some of the signs of being in that green zone is that you’re complimenting departments five times more than you’re giving a critique. So, you know, just being able to reward that whenever you see that. And then also make sure that you’ve got some sort of church wide strategy. We can very quickly do why aren’t they doing what we want them to be doing? Why aren’t they aligning around this? Do they know it?

RicH Birch — Yes.

Devin Goins — Have we have we actually talked about it enough that they know that inside and out? Do they know the objectives? Do they know our, you know, data points that we’re actually looking at? Do they know what we feel like our vision is, and why God has put us at this spot at this time? That that has to just be saturated in that continually.

Rich Birch — Oh, it’s so true. It’s been said that, you know, there’s that saying vision leaks. But I heard someone recently add vision leaks and alignment evaporates.

Devin Goins — Ooh yeah.

Rich Birch — …like it just, you know, we we have to work at this constantly. Can I double click on the resource scarcity idea? I think that’s a particular for executive pastors. There are some XPs that can be seen as the “no” people like. And I know it’s none of the people listening to this podcast, but it’s, talk to us about that. I think you’re absolutely right. I think a part of our job is to there’s a train going down the tracks. Our job is to get far enough out and lay down tracks so that thing can keep going. But that means we got to be thinking ahead on some of these issues. What does that functionally look like for you, for your team? How do we ensure that we have enough resource so that we’re not getting people to fight over it down downstream?

Devin Goins — So really going after those sacred cows, at first, I think is is good. Sometimes when there’s a period of growth we tie everything that’s been going on at that time is the causation for that growth. And sometimes what we found is that sometimes something can grow not because of something, but in spite of something. And that can be very dangerous whenever you get those two things confused, because you might be doubling down on something…

Rich Birch — That’s so true. That’s so true.

Devin Goins — …that something else is working so well that’s able to overcome that. But you’ve identified that as the thing that’s your special sauce. And so to to really look at that and go, hey, let’s discern what do we think is actually moving the needle here?

Rich Birch — That’s so true.

Devin Goins — And how do we make sure that we, we, sufficiently resource that and there may be items that we have to let go of as, as we scale. I call it organizational sprawl. That’s a tendency that happens is we’re really excited about this thing. And so we launched it and it’s front focused and all that. And then it is this with some resources over here, but it’s kind of dwindling. But then we have this other thing over here where excited about. So then we resource that and inadvertently we end up with a budget crunch. And so everybody’s not resourced quite to their effectiveness.

Devin Goins — And so I think being able to identify, hey, what are some key focuses right now, work that into the strategic plan. And if you’re growing and you aren’t actively cutting something, again it’s most of us don’t have ministries that are bad. Most of us don’t have items that we’re like that is completely ineffective. But it could be stifling and it could be taking some resources that you really need to get to that next level and what’s working. So obviously that goes back to communication, that goes back to buy in, that goes back to some great leadership traits that our lead pastor has of being able to simplify as we grow. But that’s, that’s just key because otherwise it’s going to be a smaller piece of the pie as you continue to grow and you’re going to face that resource scarcity.

Rich Birch — Yeah. I hope you were listening in, friends. That little nugget there is worth the price of admission. That has been my experience in leading in fast growing churches is what got us here, is not going to get us there. And we have to, I forget who said you got to shoot your darlings, you got to kill the stuff that’s working but isn’t pushing you towards, you know, the mission. And that is hard to do. That is that is difficult. It’s difficult, long work. But that’s why God’s put us in the roles we’re in. That’s a part of our job. And I just literally just recently last week, week, two weeks ago, was talking to a church leader about a program that by all expenses, they were on the outside saying, hey, this thing is working. Like it’s like if you were to judge you and say, this is working. But when you look up under the hood, it wasn’t pushing the mission forward. And they’re working with their team to say, well, this is the end of it. We’re, we’re, we’re, we’re sundowning it. And I was like, good for you. That’s what we got to do.

Rich Birch — We’ve got we’re going to link to a resource. This is a resource that you use internally. This is that working together document. Tell us a little bit about this document. We’ll make it available for folks. But this is a great resource for them.

Devin Goins — Yeah, obviously we’re audio only. and so there’s, there’s a document that’s a PDF that we use. It’s actually the slide deck, that I use with it and the diagnostic tool. It’s got the scope of care and what you’re really leading people through. And there’s several points that that we didn’t even cover a day of helping people identify which zone are they in, what’s kind of some causes that might be putting them there, and then what what are some ways that you can get out of there. And then of course, with the green zone, how how if you are there, can you stay there? Because it’s not going to happen naturally. Something got you there. And we want to keep you there. And as leaders, we won’t be able to help you, and disciple you in that way.

Devin Goins — And so hopefully it’s a blessing. It’s something that we did, you know, a 20 to 30 minute, all-staff, and then a lot of departments then went out and said, okay, let’s we’ve got our personal stuff that we’re dealing with. Where do we think we are as a department?

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Devin Goins — And how can we as a department actually start to do a little bit more green zone thinking? How can we align objectives? Where are we doing passion projects that probably really don’t, it’s not that they don’t align, but they also don’t push it as far forward. So that’s been very helpful for us as well.

Rich Birch — Yeah. That’s good. So, so helpful. Again, I think there are listeners who are listening in who a light bulb has gone off and they’re like, you know, there’s this team member who just get under my skin because they don’t get it. They don’t get it. They’re always thinking about themselves. And they and we just have not given that person the words to lead them out of the red zone, you know, and get them into green. I think you’ve done a great task here. This is fantastic. Any kind of final words as we wrap up today’s episode?

Devin Goins — No, I think, just don’t discount your value as a as a leader of the church. You know, be encouraged. These are these are good times. Don’t be afraid to to have these things take some time. That’s that’s one of the things our lead pastor, I think one of the great benefits that we’ve had with him is just consistency and planting seeds. Often with alignment, it takes time, it takes a lot of hard conversations, but it’s worth it. And I do believe that that, the Lord will will bless it. Because we, we ultimately we aren’t just aligning to ourselves or our ideals. We’re trying to align people towards, towards the gospel and that we can share that with even more people. So keep fighting the good fight. You’re valuable. And, I hope, today helped.

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s super helpful. If people want to track with you or with the church, where do we want to send them? Online?

Devin Goins — Yeah. Please, please visit our, our social, for the church, @biltmorechurch, on Instagram, Facebook, all the above. I’m not in the comms team now, but I hired people that are much better than I was and so they do a fantastic job.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Devin Goins — I’ve got I’ve got an Instagram, but it’s just a whole lot of photos of the western North Carolina mountains.

Rich Birch — Hey!

Devin Goins — …that’s nice for that. So if you want that, that’s that’s good. If you want church stuff, the church channel and then our, our lead pastor, @pastorbrucefrank – you can follow him there. And he’s got great content as well.

Rich Birch — That’s great. Thanks so much, Devin. I really appreciate you being here today and all the best as you continue to lead at Biltmore.

Devin Goins — Thank you. Thanks for having me on.

What if you could double your church’s attendance this Christmas … just by doing what other growing churches already do?

In this second installment of our special Christmas planning series, Rich Birch unpacks three real-life examples from churches that didn’t leave Christmas up to chance—and saw incredible results. These churches represent different regions and contexts, but all share a key trait: they treat Christmas like a growth engine, not just a tradition.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

The 2x Benchmark: Rich shares a healthy target for churches during Christmas—double your average attendance—and explains why this isn’t just about numbers, but about reaching people who are spiritually open during this season.

Lake Hills Church – Austin, TX: This church ignited a “Big Day Rally Cry” by creating a 12-minute pre-Christmas moment in their service, featuring testimony, vision casting, and a live invitation challenge. You’ll hear how they rallied hundreds to invite friends, right there in the room.

Verve City Church – Chino, CA: Learn how this innovative church packaged a “VIP Christmas Guest Experience” using mailers and digital ads to drive pre-registration, offer special guest perks, and radically boost first-time attendance.

NBUC / New Beginnings Church – Ontario, Canada: Discover how they turned Christmas into a leadership development moment by launching a “Volunteer Invite Challenge” that blended prayer, accountability, and a little healthy competition to motivate core team members to reach out.

These examples aren’t complex—they’re systems that any church can adapt and implement.

Rich reminds us: “Churches that grow don’t leave Christmas to chance.” Now is the time to put systems in place, build momentum, and prepare your team to make the most of the biggest Sunday of the year.

This episode is part 2 of a special 3-part series designed to help your church plan ahead for Christmas, starting this summer.
If you missed part 1, be sure to go back and check out:
“Why Christmas Can Still Be the Biggest Service of the Year At Your Church” Listen Now

Be sure to follow or subscribe so you don’t miss part 3 next week, where we’ll explore why churches sometimes fail to grow during the holidays—and how you can avoid those pitfalls.