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   Number 1: Making Scripture Come Alive for People Who Think They’ve Heard It All with Jason Hildebrand

   Welcome back to another episode of the unSeminary podcast. We’re talking with Jason Hildebrand, founder of Presence Creative Arts. For nearly 30 years, Jason has used acting, storytelling, film, and coaching to help people encounter scripture in fresh ways while creating space to listen for the voice of God. How can churches use art and storytelling to help people slow down and engage with God more deeply? What happens when creativity becomes less about delivering a message and more about creating space for transformation? Tune in as Jason shares the journey behind The Shepherd and the Sound, a contemplative film exploring the life of David, and the lessons he has learned about creativity, obedience, presence, and storytelling. Create space for people to slow down. // We are living in an age of distraction and disconnection. Rather than creating another piece of content people consume quickly, The Shepherd and the Sound intentionally slows viewers down. The pacing, landscape, music, and storytelling create space for people to become present to what is happening inside themselves and to listen for God. Jason has seen viewers reach instinctively for their phones before realizing they are being invited to remain present in the experience. Help people find themselves in the story. // One of Jason’s biggest discoveries during the project was that powerful storytelling gives people room to recognize their own experiences within a biblical narrative. Instead of simply explaining David’s life, the film invites viewers to encounter themes like failure, loss, lament, family, identity, and grace. As people see pieces of their own stories reflected in David’s journey, the biblical story becomes personal rather than distant. Tell stories that reveal real people. // Jason’s work has consistently focused on embodying scripture rather than simply presenting information about it. Whether performing the life of Jesus, Job, Abraham, or David, he wants audiences to experience biblical characters as real human beings with emotions, struggles, failures, and desires. For Jason, faithful storytelling does not require removing the humanity from scripture. Rather, bringing that humanity forward can actually help people encounter the truth of the story more deeply. Obedience often comes before clarity. // The journey to produce The Shepherd and the Sound required Jason to move forward without having every answer. After sensing that God was calling the team to film in Scotland, Jason received confirmation from trusted prayer partners and advisors and stepped out financially before the resources were available. Shortly afterward, donors began providing what the project needed. The process reinforced Jason’s conviction that listening carefully and responding obediently sometimes means moving before the entire path is visible. Let God handle the transformation. // Early in his career, Jason wrestled with whether Christian art needed to be more overtly evangelistic. He eventually sensed God reminding him that transformation was God’s responsibility, not his. Jason’s role was to faithfully create excellent art while carrying the presence of Christ into the work. That realization released him from forcing a message into every project and allowed him to focus on creating truthful, beautiful stories that invite people into deeper questions. Gather people for shared experiences. // Rather than immediately releasing The Shepherd and the Sound onto a streaming platform, Jason and his team have prioritized live screenings. People gather in theaters or creative spaces, are invited to slow down before the film begins, experience the story together, and then participate in conversation afterward. Jason believes transformation often happens differently when people experience something in community rather than consuming it alone. Extend the experience beyond the film. // The Shepherd and the Sound has grown into more than a movie. Presence Creative Arts has developed an immersive gallery with eight stations exploring themes from the film along with a small group resource incorporating scripture, reflection, sensory experiences, and action. These tools help churches move people beyond simply watching a story and toward personally engaging with what God may be stirring in them. To learn more about Jason Hildebrand and Presence Creative Arts, visit presencecreativearts.com. You can also explore The Shepherd and the Sound and learn about screenings and resources at theshepherdandthesoundfilm.com. Thank You for Tuning In! There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, but you chose unSeminary, and I’m grateful for that. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it by using the social media buttons you see at the left hand side of this page. Also, kindly consider taking the 60-seconds it takes to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, they’re extremely helpful when it comes to the ranking of the show and you can bet that I read every single one of them personally! Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: Intulse If you’re committed to the growth of your church, make sure your communication systems are set up so nobody feels left behind. When your church is smaller, that comes easy. You know people by name. A guest doesn’t get lost in the shuffle—someone follows up, every guest, every time. But growth can change that—unless your systems grow with you. Perhaps this church using Intulse says it best: “Intulse has revolutionized the way we communicate with people, giving us the ability to make a big church feel small because of that personal connection.” The Intulse app gives your team members a working church number, so anyone can call or text without ever handing out a personal number. Every conversation syncs straight into your ChMS, like Planning Center, so your whole staff stays on the same page—no matter who a person talks to. That’s how you keep every person feeling known, no matter how big your church gets. Want to know if your communication systems are ready for growth? Download Intulse’s free guide, “10 Communication Blind Spots That Hinder Church Growth,” at Intulse.com/unseminary. And if any of those blind spots hit home for you, schedule a call with one of their church communication specialists to learn how Intulse can help. Episode Transcript Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. I am so glad that you’ve decided to tune in today. Listen, friends, give us this next half an hour or so, and I think you’re going to be challenged and encouraged. I think it’s going great conversation. Rich Birch — This is a person that I have, you know, a friend of a friend we met, and I want you to meet them as well. But more than that, I think that this conversation could lead to something that could really help your church later this year, maybe into next year. I want to introduce you to Jason Hildebrand. He runs, leads an organization called Presence Creative Arts. Rich Birch — It was formed close to 25 years ago, or the deep desire to create and perform authentic, hope-filled, spirit-infused stories. Part storyteller, he’s part creative catalyst. This is going to be a fantastic conversation. He’s produced a bunch of different projects that we’re going to get a chance to kind of tiptoe into, learn a little bit more about. Jason, welcome to the podcast. So glad you’re here. Jason Hildebrand — Hey Rich, thanks so much. So great to be here. Rich Birch — Yeah, I’m pumped to to kind of have this conversation. Jason Hildebrand — Me as well. Rich Birch — So friends, to to pull back the veil a little bit, Jason’s a friend of a friend. Jason Hildebrand — Yeah. Rich Birch — And we were talking a little bit about what he does. And I started digging in and literally I thought, man, I’ve got to get Jason on the podcast. So for folks who maybe have not encountered Presence Creative Arts, take us back and kind of tell us the story. Jason Hildebrand — Sure. Rich Birch — How did this whole thing get started? Jason Hildebrand — Well, funny enough, my my wife was saying to me yesterday, in September, isn’t it 30 years, Jason? And I was like, oh my gosh, 30 years. Rich Birch — Oh, ah that’s funny. Jason Hildebrand — So we were like, whoa, it kind of snuck up on us. Rich Birch — Yes. Jason Hildebrand — But I mean, the whole genesis was, ah you know, I’m an actor by trade. I have a undergrad and a master’s in acting. And, you know, all those years ago, I graduated from York University in Toronto, Canada, and went out and I was like the fresh young wanted to be in, you know, Hollywood movies or to do Shakespeare or whatever. And, and in the midst of all that, God just like, halted the whole thing and had me completely move in an entirely different direction. And my first solo theater show was on the life of David. Jason Hildebrand — And I had a district superintendent in the denomination that I was a part of take me around to all the pastors conferences. And I he would speak and I would perform. And that was kind of like the beginning of what I never would have conceived would become a career. And now 30 years later, like a full company with employees and and you know projects and all those kind of things. And yeah I was an actor who just wanted to get on stage. And and really really, the thing is, and and I’ve learned this over the 30 years, is that my place of deepest listening for the voice of God is in front a whole bunch of people standing, which is really a weird thing to say. Jason Hildebrand — But, you know, I think it speaks to how we’re all wired differently and we need to find that thing that allows us to hear most clearly the voice of God. And that’s often the place for me. Jason Hildebrand — I think a lot of it has to do with that. I really feel responsible for bringing the the the show on David was, you know, it’s almost word for word scripture. So I feel responsible like any pastor or preacher would be like, I’m bringing this thing and I need to be aligned inside and out. Jason Hildebrand — But that that kind of grew. And so we did more. I did more. It was first just me. And I did that, toured all over the world, performing those things. Jason Hildebrand — Then I had I did a show on the Book of Job, which was very um gruesome in some ways, but quite intense. And and I’ve been revisiting that ah that in the last little while. Series of monologues in the prodigal son, I’ve done Abraham. Jason Hildebrand — And then I adapted Donald Miller’s book, Blue Like Jazz. That was kind of a kind of took us to the next level with what we were doing. It was a multimedia show and we kind of toured it all over Canada and the US before the film came out, like the film film that that that Steve Taylor and Donald Miller made. Jason Hildebrand — And we’ve just grown this over the over the course of, you know, 30 years. And right before the we right as the pandemic happened, you know, we had this great season coming up. We were touring and and I also do a lot of coaching with pastors, both on communication and listening to God, work with Arrow Leadership and a bunch of other organizations. I think one of the things they don’t teach you in seminary very well, in my opinion, that is just my opinion. Rich Birch — Yes. Jason Hildebrand — My experience was they teach you how to exegete text really well. Oftentimes, they don’t teach you how to communicate that to small rooms and large rooms very effectively. And so I’ve been working with pastors for years on you know voice burnout, communication, how do you hit the back of this how do you hit the back of the auditorium with your thoughts? All those kind of things. Jason Hildebrand — But COVID hits, and we have this great season, and everything falls apart. And God directs us and we’re just we had a donor come to us. We’re we sit under a not-for-profit umbrella as well. And donor came to us and said, well, what would you do if you had money? And at that time, you know we everything on social media was doom and gloom and everything was falling apart. Rich Birch — Right. Jason Hildebrand — And and I thought, could we craft something like short bursts of permission to be present in your life, short bursts of hope, and just release those for free into the world. Jason Hildebrand — And so this donor, I was telling him, you know, I think we could we could make short films on the Psalms. And those would be kind of like little, little breaths of fresh air. And so he gave us a, this couple gave us a, you know, a chunk of money. And we ended up making seven films that kind of blew up on Facebook and went all over the world. And, and we’ve since shot 11, but that kind of shift into media happened. Jason Hildebrand — And then out of that, ah the last basically five years of my life, which has been um crafting this new film rooted in that original story 30 years ago on the life of David… Rich Birch — That’s crazy. Jason Hildebrand — …but a contemplative film on the life of David called The Shepherd and the Sound, which we shot in Scotland. So that’s been kind of the like very Coles Notes version of of of what we’ve been doing. But you know I think the biggest, highest value is, as a company, we have ah a very high value on um listening for the voice of God, cultivating that. And, and if he all of a sudden tells us to go left instead of right, I want to be, I want to be, we want to be nimble enough to be able to shift like that. Jason Hildebrand — And oftentimes it’s not the most popular choice or even the most lucrative choice, but, but I’m more interested in the kingdom choice that I have in the other things. So, you know, that’s, that’s kind of our framework of of what we do and and kind of the, you know, the, but the timeline of things. Jason Hildebrand — And, uh, so, you know, it’s, it’s been, it’s been it’s been wild. It’s definitely 100% not where I thought I would be, you know, 30 years ago, but like I could not be more grateful that we get to kind of both care… Jason Hildebrand — The other values that we have are like carrying presence in story and this kind of thing. I know that we’ve had the the chat about this before, but it’s it’s I think I grew up in ah in a culture that was very high on the on on exegeting and the mind. And here’s how we pull apart one word and these kind of things. And here’s how we do things. And it’s very linear. And that’s great stuff. I think we need to be still doing that. Jason Hildebrand — But I had an the reason that I even did anything that I did is that i watched a guy. There’s an actor and named Bruce Kuhn. And he, my wife and I were dating at the time, she was going to McMaster University, and she invited me to this one man show on the book of Luke, King James Luke. Rich Birch — Wow. Jason Hildebrand — And I was dragged kicking and screaming as about Oh, my goodness, it’s gonna be some crappy Christian theater, and I don’t want to go see it. And that was the first time watching that guy was incredible. And that was the first time I actually encountered scripture. It came alive in me and I was like, oh, that’s what I’ve been reading for all these years. Oh, that that with real people, with real stories. Rich Birch — Yes. Jason Hildebrand — And I think that marked me in a way that has been significant and transformative. And and it’s it’s so much of what I my heart is to impart through Presence in what we’re doing. Rich Birch — Love it. And you know friends that are listening in like I’ve known of Jason for a while. Like you know we’re we’re in similar circles. Like you know, obviously… Jason Hildebrand — Yeah. Rich Birch — …church world in Canada is not the biggest thing. And but I had I had heard specifically about this project, The Shepherd and The Sound. And I was like, what on earth did he do that? And then saw trailer and was super intrigued and you know wanted to lean in. And and you put a word to this there that I’ve always appreciated about your work. I’ve actually years ago i remember seeing you um it might have even been like one of those youth things or something years ago. Rich Birch — And and the the part I’ve struck by your handling of scripture of these stories that we’ve been telling each other for thousands of years that are true is you, and this is my language, not your language, but you’re doing a better job here talking about Presence, but it’s like, you’ve humanized them in a similar way that, and I was thinking about this over the weekend before we called—you know, I, I was ah my wife dragged me to The Chosen. Jason Hildebrand — Oh, yeah. Right. Rich Birch — And was like, I was like, I do not want to see more crappy Christian media. Jason Hildebrand — Yes. Right. Rich Birch — And I have been struck by the very human moments in that art and actually have thought a lot about what you do and thought like, oh, there’s ah there’s a resonance there. It’s obviously different. It’s a different kind of thing. Rich Birch — But there’s a similar kind of piece there where it’s like, are we brave enough to kind of look at the human side of what’s happening? And so tell me about The Shepherd and The Sound. I think this is a crazy project. Jason Hildebrand — It’s been a crazy project. Rich Birch — When I saw this, I was like, tell me about it. Jason Hildebrand — Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rich Birch — Just kind of unpack it, what it is. Jason Hildebrand — Sure. Well, I mean, thank you for saying that. I mean, I’m very interested, I used to call it, you know, enfleshing, but that got a little bit weird. I think people thought it was a weird, but more more like embodying. Jason Hildebrand — I have this solo performance that I still do on the life on the life of Jesus called Jesus Stories. And the number one comment is, oh, he oh Jesus had emotions. Oh oh oh oh, wait a minute. He laughed. Oh, he was he was he was upset. Oh, wait, he’s passionate about loving people. Like just very human things. Rich Birch — Yes. Jason Hildebrand — And I think, like you said, The Chosen has done a brilliant job of you know um allowing Jesus to be both a human being and God at the same time. But The Shepherd and the Sound, yeah. Jason Hildebrand — So, I mean, I’ve been dreaming about doing a film version of um of of the David my David show for maybe a decade. And I didn’t know what it I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing. I didn’t know what it looked like. And then again, during COVID, I’d written like a full cast treatment. Jason Hildebrand — What ended up, you know, what’s interesting now is that House of David came out on ah on Amazon and it’s it’s very amazing. Like it’s it’s quite it’s quite great, especially so season two is quite great. Jason Hildebrand — And I realized why that God was like, actually, you’re not supposed to do this. You’re supposed to do that because those people are going to do this. And I was like, oh, okay, I get it. And they’re way more qualified than than I was to attempt something like that. Jason Hildebrand — But all I kept hearing was go to Scotland. and ah and connect with a couple of people you know there. And and and so I went, my my film partner, Tad Munnings and I, he’s with StoryStream Creative, and we we we kind of location scouted to Scotland. Jason Hildebrand — And we have this friend, this incredible playwright, screenwriter named Murray Watts, who owns a castle in Northern Scotland called Fresic. As people do. Rich Birch — Yes, as one does. Jason Hildebrand — I know it’s it’s it’s actually a Christian retreat center. Rich Birch — Yes. Jason Hildebrand — So if you want to have the most extraordinary experience, go to this castle. It’s ah it’s ah really an Airbnb castle, which is wild, in the northern very northern tip of Scotland. Jason Hildebrand — But one of the one of the best things I ever did for my for my company was form an intercessory prayer board. And it’s just a small handful of people that kind of lift us up, which I just cannot be more grateful for those folks. Jason Hildebrand — So two of those people live in Wales. and And so I when we were hitting Glasgow, I picked Tad up in Glasgow, and we were about to head up north. And i was they said, can you hop on a Zoom call? There are folks that pray for Europe on a regular basis, this this these these two people and their group, part of the twenty four seven prayer movement. Jason Hildebrand — And so I said, sure. So I hopped on the call and my friend Charlotte from Wales, who’s on my board, says, hey, can you just tell everybody what you’re up to? And so I was like, OK. So I said, you know, I think we’re supposed to do a film on David. I think it’s supposed to be in the north. I think it’s supposed to be kind of like man wrestling with the with his the demons of his past. I mean, David’s life is mostly a disaster after he becomes king. Rich Birch — Right. Jason Hildebrand — And uh and and uh and we don’t have any money. And uh I thought it was supposed to be a full ensemble cast but now I’m kind of hearing no it’s supposed to be more contemplative and it’s supposed to be a guy wandering around the landscape. And I thought—this was my argument with God prior to the prior to that—it’s like who wants to watch a guy wandering around. And then he reminded me of Castaway and he said that’s a pretty good movie. And was like oh yeah I guess that’s true. Jason Hildebrand — But anyway, so I’m on this call with these folks, these lovely intercessors, and there’s 25 of them on the call. And I tell them all this, and they said, oh, you have to shoot next summer. And I said, what do what do you mean you have to shoot next summer? Jason Hildebrand — And they said, we are on the cusp of the 100th anniversary of a number of revivals that came out of northern Scotland that changed the world. Rich Birch — wow Jason Hildebrand — And God wants to pour out his spirit through Scotland to the nations, and you need to be part of that. And I was like, whoa. Rich Birch — Wow. Okay. Jason Hildebrand — Whoa, okay. Rich Birch — I thought I was just coming on a Zoom call. Jason Hildebrand — Well, I don’t even, quite I didn’t. Do you have money? Like, I don’t know. Rich Birch — Yes. Jason Hildebrand — Like, does anybody, you know? Rich Birch — Yes. Jason Hildebrand — And, you know, this is not how you plan how to do a project or a film shoot. Normally you have everything lined up. The money’s lined up. The script’s lined up. And and but God tends to throw me off a cliff, or asks me to jump off the cliff. And then as I’m plummeting to my doom, he shows up, you know, and rescues. Jason Hildebrand — So so I come back home and all I’m feeling, Rich, in my spirit is I want you to book all the flights and accommodation for your whole crew. Jason Hildebrand — And I’m like, I don’t I don’t have any of the money. Like I don’t even have enough. We were in a season just coming out of COVID. but I didn’t even and have enough money to pay my staff. We were just like scraping by. And so I’m like, I, so I’m wrestling with God over this. This is stupid. This is irresponsible. And I send a note to my intercessory prayer board and say, Hey guys, here’s what I’m hearing. Jason Hildebrand — And they all went back and came to, they said, yep, that’ that’s good. You’re on, you’re on track. And I was like, what? And then I sent a note to my board, like my board of advisors. And I, and I said, here’s what I’m, and I have people on my board on purpose that tell me no, cause I tend to be a bit of a dreamer. Rich Birch — Yes. Jason Hildebrand — But I have those kind of like check me people on my on my board. Rich Birch — Sure. Jason Hildebrand — And I said, here’s what I’m hearing. What do you think? And they all went, yep, you’re hearing right. And I was like, what are you talking about? When is it responsible to take out loans? Rich Birch — Wow. Wow. Jason Hildebrand — And like, when is that’s not responsible? But they were both affirming me. Rich Birch — Yes. Jason Hildebrand — So the next week I am in, I’m at a retreat center that’s just built this massive new building. Jason Hildebrand — It’s a 30 year vision and I’m performing as part of their thank you to all the people that helped build this building, a vision. Five million dollar building, incredible. It’s really extraordinary. And I’m sitting at the dinner before performing next to one of their board members. And she turns to me and she says, oh, Jason, so what do you do? And I said, well, and I’m an actor. I have a creative arts company. Well, what are you working on? Well, I’ve just been to Scotland and I’m thinking about doing this thing. She goes, oh, I see a picture. Jason Hildebrand — And I go, ah okay, what? She goes, yeah, there’s a ledger. And all the income and expenses add up to zero at the bottom. And the Lord says, just go do what I told you to do. Rich Birch — Wow. Wow. Jason Hildebrand — So, i mean I mean, I don’t roll in lots of like prophetic charis… Rich Birch — Yes, that’s not normative. Jason Hildebrand — Like this is not my, nor like I’m I have great value for the prophetic and for for words of knowledge… Rich Birch — Yes. Jason Hildebrand — …but I don’t roll in kind of a lot of those worlds. Rich Birch — Yeah. Jason Hildebrand — So I’m like, okay, cool. Like, okay. So I came home, Rich, and I was just like, okay, God, I hear you. And so I did it. I went to the bank. And as you know, as as as ah as ah as a small business owner, it’s like you got to go through all the rigmarole. I increased my line of credit. I increased my credit cards. And I put 50 grand on on on credit. Rich Birch — Wow. Jason Hildebrand — And I thought, well, after 25 years, Lord, you’re actually either we’re going down in a blaze of glory or you actually talked to me. Like, I don’t know what it is, but here it is, right? Rich Birch — Right. Jason Hildebrand — So, and then I left it. And then as soon as I did it, I felt complete peace about it, which was shocking to me. And I was kind of grumpy with God. Like, okay, like I should be very stressed out about this, for Lord. So anyway, I left it, man. and And then two weeks later, I’m at a completely separate event. Jason Hildebrand — It has nothing to do with my company. And but there’s a donor couple there that has given to our work before. And they say, yeah oh we hear you’re working on ah on a movie on David. And I said, yeah, yeah, working on David. Jason Hildebrand — Well, you know, tell us about it. So I’m doing all the good due diligence things, right? Here’s our outcomes. Here’s what we’re hoping to achieve. Here’s the blah, blah, blah. All of things, you know, in art, it’s almost impossible to measure, you know, the the art. Rich Birch — Right. Jason Hildebrand — Like, you know… Rich Birch — Yes. Jason Hildebrand — These are 18 people had their hearts changed by this piece of art. Right. Rich Birch — Right. Jason Hildebrand — But anyway, I’m doing all the things you’re supposed to do. And they said, well, how much money is it going to take to get to the other side of of filming this thing? And I said, well, probably about 200 grand. And I hadn’t done any fundraising yet… Rich Birch — Right. Right. Jason Hildebrand — …but I’m 50 grand in the hole. And they looked at each other and they looked back at me and they said, yeah, we can do that. Rich Birch — Wow. Jason Hildebrand — And, and they wrote me a check, Rich, for 200 grand the next week. Rich Birch — Wow. Wow. Jason Hildebrand — And that was the start of, we went back three times. God was as, even as we went and began to shoot, he was, we came back the first time and we’re like, that’s not it. We went back three times and he began to reveal that what he really wanted in the process and more and more money cut coming in another hundred thousand, another two, another 50,000. Rich Birch — Wow. Jason Hildebrand — Like, you know, we, the, the budget ended up being over 600 grand for this thing. And, um, Just extraordinary miracle after extraordinary miracle, both while we were filming and in providing for the filming. Rich Birch — That’s so good. Jason Hildebrand — It’s really incredible. And so in the process, what this is this is was the big learning for me. One is he wanted us to tell a tale to give space for people to slow down and to listen. Jason Hildebrand — I think we live in an age of distraction and disconnection. And what he was asking us to craft, and i’m not I wasn’t clever enough to figure this out. He revealed it and as we were as we were doing it. Jason Hildebrand — But what is the way we can help people slow down as they’re on their phones and they’re busy and they’ve got this thing and the other thing? To create space within the context of the film to literally almost in a way cause people to slow down and feel uncomfortable. Jason Hildebrand — We did a screening of the film and a lady said…And I tell people it’s going to cause you to feel uncomfortable. Rich Birch — Right. Jason Hildebrand — She says, I’m so glad you did that because halfway through it through the film, I reached for my phone and I went, oh, no, Jason asked me to to like be present in the in the film. And that present moment was a catalyst to massive transformation in her heart. Jason Hildebrand — But so the first thing was like help people to slow down and connect to what’s going on in the side themselves, in community with God. Rich Birch — Yep. Jason Hildebrand — And the second thing is, is, and I didn’t, need I would have never even thought this, is to invite people to find themselves in the story. So you’re both having a moment to be present and connect with who you are and who God made you to be and and God himself. Rich Birch — Love it. Jason Hildebrand — And also then go, oh, my story, there’s moments in this David story that actually resonate with my journey right now. And that was like a revelation to myself and our team. And then out of that, we you know also built an immersive gallery, like think Stations of the Cross meets Immersive Van Gogh and a small group resource to go with it. Rich Birch — Yep. Jason Hildebrand — That was very non-Bible study-y. Rich Birch — Sure. Jason Hildebrand — It’s kind of a small group resource for people who don’t like Bible study-y resources. You know what I mean? Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, that’s good. Jason Hildebrand — Yeah. Rich Birch — Okay, there’s a lot I want to unpack there. So ah friends that are listening in, want, I want so um You listen to a lot of podcasts. You do a lot of things. Jason Hildebrand — Sure. Rich Birch — You’ve listened to us. That’s great. I want you to go and watch the trailer. We will link to the trailer in the show notes. Jason Hildebrand — Cool. Rich Birch — You can even stop now and go and do that. Or at the end, I want you to watch the trailer because I think obviously it’s hard to talk about this and without seeing it. Jason Hildebrand — True. Yeah. Rich Birch — So I would, I want people to, to do that. But come back to this idea. So put us, put us, one of the stories I want people to hear is your just obedience. Like, that’s incredible. Like, I think that’s amazing. Like, and want to honor you for that. It would have been easy to shut that down at multiple points in that story and just be like, no, I’m not hearing this. Like I move on. So just honor you for that. Jason Hildebrand — Thank you. Rich Birch — And the fact To me, that feels very Jesus-y. That feels that that feels like the Jesus I know where he’s like, hey, you got to take a step here and then I’m going to step in and help. That feels like, man, I’ve seen that time and time again. Jason Hildebrand — Yeah. Rich Birch — And so that’s that’s incredible. Rich Birch — Give us a sense of on the ground. So you’re shooting this thing. Jason Hildebrand — Yeah. Rich Birch — Again, it’s dramatic. It’s it’s contemplative. It’s um, what was that experience like? What did you take away from that as a performer, as a leader? You know talk us through that. Jason Hildebrand — Well, I would say first and foremost, one of my greatest one of my greatest joys is getting to getting to work with extraordinary people. I think that I’ve always thought I need to find the people that are better at me than doing the thing and invite them into my world so I can learn and grow and we can bring those people in. So we had an extraordinary cinematographer, or sound person, all these. Got to bring a couple of my kids with me over the course of the time too to do Begrips, which is really cool. Rich Birch — That’s cool. Jason Hildebrand — But I mean, we’re shooting in Northern Scotland. So, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s magic. I mean, the, the place is, the place is wild. But we, we, we location scouted and showed up when we’re a little bit like, Lord, where’s the fertile ground? Jason Hildebrand — Like we’ve not, we’ve been here once. We don’t know where we, we actually don’t know how to frame this whole thing. You’ve got to direct us. And so we would, we, in the morning we would pray, like show us where we’re supposed to go. And we would, we would, I mean, of course we had, we had a plan. Rich Birch — Yes. Jason Hildebrand — You know we entered in with a plan, but oftentimes the plan would be like, I think we should go here. Rich Birch — Right. Jason Hildebrand — You know, I think we should go there. I mean, we went the first time we went, this is hilarious. Jason Hildebrand — I didn’t know much about sheep. And of course the whole film is about David. So there needs to be sheep around. And we actually, we actually hired a shepherd to bring sheep into, into a field that he owned. And the sheep would not come near me. Rich Birch — Right. Jason Hildebrand — Like just would not come anywhere. Like we tried to wrangle them. It was horrible, horrible, horrible. Rich Birch — Yeah. Jason Hildebrand — And then the second time we went, it was just myself and my director, film partner. And we ended up being on the Isle of Skye. And it was probably the most, one of the most extraordinary moments that we had in the film, which was, you know, I my my my Tad is, my film partner, is like very super uber in shape guy. And I’m in shape, but not to his his level. Jason Hildebrand — So we’re kind of hiking all over Scotland. He’s got most of the gear. He’s got the bag and the camera and the thing and the drone, and I’m carrying the tripod and all the different things. And so we go to this one place and it’s, it’s, it’s literally like ah like a sheer rock face that goes up and then like kind of a meadow on the top of it. Not very big, but it’s glorious and you’re right on the ocean. Jason Hildebrand —And um so we had already hiked in off the main road about two hours through bogs and different things. And it, know, it’s, it’s bonkers trying to hike in Scotland. We called it the the radical common sense country because there’s no warnings anywhere. Jason Hildebrand — Like if you fall off the cliff, you’re just stupid. You shouldn’t have fallen on off the cliff. There’s like in North America, we’d have like a thousand like signs saying you’re going to fall off the cliff, but not in Scotland. Rich Birch — Yes. Yes. No. Jason Hildebrand — They just look at you and go, that was stupid. Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah. Jason Hildebrand — But so we we we get to the bottom of this rock face after we’ve climbed up. And I’m just like, he says, I think we should climb up. It’s like a three-story rock face, right? Rich Birch — Oh, wow. Jason Hildebrand — And I’m thinking, there’s no way I’m climbing up that three-story rock face. And he’s like, I’ve got you. Like, I have got you. And I’m like, okay, you know, if I die, my wife is going to come kill you. And then she’s going to come to meet Jesus and she’s going to kill me again. Like, you know, this is not good. But he, so he helped me climb this rock face. And it was, it was, I was the most scared I’ve ever been in my life. Rich Birch — Amazing. Wow. Jason Hildebrand — And then as I’m going up, I’m thinking, I got to come down. Like, I gotta come down. So, but the the extraordinary part was, so we come up and he goes, okay, I’m just gonna scurry down and I’m gonna throw the drone up. Jason Hildebrand — And so sit in this one place and I’m gonna put the drone around. And this is this is the magic of the whole thing. And I’ve had so many people say, is this, did you guys do this with CGI? Rich Birch — Oh, nice. Jason Hildebrand — So the the the sun is setting in the background, on the ocean, on the top of a cliff, beautiful green meadow on the top. So Tad puts the drone up and the battery immediately dies. He’s like, ah crap. So it comes back to him, puts in a second battery. And as he’s coming up, the the drone goes up and starts to circle around me. And as he’s doing that, five sheep come out of nowhere up onto the platform one by one. Look at me. And I’m just like, we hadn’t seen any sheep. No sheep would come near me. Rich Birch — Yes. Yes. Jason Hildebrand — And all of a sudden they’re like right there. Rich Birch — Wow. Yeah. Jason Hildebrand — And one by one, they go over the other side of the cliff and down until one sheep and I are looking at each other. And I’m now it’s a wide shot. So you can’t see my expression really, but I’m just weeping. I’m like, Lord, like what on earth? Rich Birch — Wow. Wow. That’s amazing. Jason Hildebrand — And it goes down the other side and it finishes the drone finishes going around me and the the battery dies again, and it has to go back. Rich Birch — Wow. Jason Hildebrand — And I’m like, what just happened? And it’s the final shot in the whole film. Rich Birch — Wow. Jason Hildebrand — And it’s this encapsulation of the moment of like the faithfulness of God and David and the whole thing. And it and it was like that kind of the whole the whole time where we’d, we all of a sudden we’d be like, we were gonna go here, but I think it’s raining. So we’re gonna go to this other location. And then that was the magic of like what happened in this, in the scenery. Rich Birch — Interesting. Jason Hildebrand — it it was It was pretty special. Rich Birch — So maybe a dumb question. Why David? So why why this story? Jason Hildebrand — Yeah. Rich Birch — You know there’s obviously a lot of narratives you could have you know produced. Jason Hildebrand — Sure. Rich Birch — Why start here? Obviously, this has been a long journey for you. Like you said, 30 years ago, you started with David. Jason Hildebrand — Yeah. And I thought it was culturally relevant 30 years ago. And I feel like it’s even more culturally relevant now. Jason Hildebrand — I mean, one of the things that kind of haunts me in the, in, in a good way is I think I mentioned earlier that after he gets anointed as king, he’s mostly a disaster for the rest of his days. He makes horrible choices over and over and over again. And at the end of his days, he’s mostly screwed it up. Jason Hildebrand — Like, he you know, he kind of heard the voice of God early on. And in the in the film, we’ve actually maybe it’s something we could also chat about is I’ve been really interested in language and and using language in a way that um steps outside of the current cultural baggage that some of our evangelical language has. Jason Hildebrand — So we actually use the sound, the idea of sound as a as um as a you know a metaphor or or who the Holy Spirit is, which is kind of interesting. Jason Hildebrand — But but in the midst of this mess, I think it’s quite extraordinary that God says that David was a man after his own heart. And he literally builds the foundation of his kingdom who who moves through Jesus out of this horribly flawed man, who at the end of the day was like, you know, a murderer. Some would say a rapist. Some would say like, there’s lots of there’s lots of stuff. There’s lots a lot of mess in his life. Jason Hildebrand — And and and at the end of his days, God says, but he’s my child. He’s my boy. I love him. And and it’s it’s not because of what he’s done. It’s not his disaster. It’s his heart. Jason Hildebrand — And I think that is an incredible incredibly hopeful thought for me. Because I don’t know about you, but I feel like mostly a disaster most days. Like I’m deeply loved. I know that. But I’m like, yeah, I kind of screwed up all the time. And I mean, no not to that extent. Rich Birch — Right. Jason Hildebrand — I’m not living in that… you know. Rich Birch — Right. Jason Hildebrand — But if he, but if God can do it for that guy who is just messed up, he can certainly do it for me. And I think people, I am watching as we do these screenings that people receive that in such an incredible way. They’re like, wait, me? Jason Hildebrand — Like, wait, like I’m a…I’m loved. How really? I’m really loved. Jason Hildebrand — There’s so much hunger for that. Our culture does not provide for that. Our culture provides anxiety and are you good enough? Rich Birch — Right. Jason Hildebrand — And are you know, do you have the right things? Rich Birch — Yep. Jump higher. Jason Hildebrand — Do you have the amount amount of money? Rich Birch — Yep. Jason Hildebrand — Do you have the right clothes? Have you watched the right clips? Rich Birch — Yep. Jason Hildebrand — All those kind of things. And unconditionally in that story at the end, you know, I think he says, ah when you rule in righteousness, when you rule in fear of God, you are like the light of morning, like the brightness after the rain that brings the grass from the earth. And I just love that. Rich Birch — Love it. Jason Hildebrand — I love that. Rich Birch — Well, and speaking of the language thing and, you know, the propensity of, you know, the the evangelical world in in its kind of relationship to art… Jason Hildebrand — Sure. Rich Birch — …a lot of it can get stuck in this kind of like either preachy or like shallow or, you know, like the the it’s the quintessential, you know, evangelical film from the 80s where like the two kids, you know, one kid says like, what is it about you in your life… Jason Hildebrand — Oh, oh. Rich Birch — …that’s so different. Tell me about that. You know what i mean? Jason Hildebrand — Yes, yes. Rich Birch — Like, and that which isn’t what you’re doing. Jason Hildebrand — No. Rich Birch — How do you how do we make something that is both genuinely artful and genuinely faithful at the same time? How are you? How do you hold that to mention? I realize there’s like, there’s no formula for that. You can’t get that in a spreadsheet. But how do you think about that? Jason Hildebrand — First great story. And I think we’ve found you know in so in the scriptures, we have great story. Like, I mean, great human stories. Rich Birch — Yep. Jason Hildebrand — But I, oh man, it’s it’s, a number of years ago, I was, I don’t know if I was feeling guilty or struggling with something like what you’re suggesting. Like, I think somebody had suggested to me, like, why aren’t you more evangelical and or evangelistic in your approach to your work? Jason Hildebrand — And so I was like, oh do I have to be to like, to you know, and and I think there’s some people who are, a I have a friend who’s an evangelist and the guy, you know, gets on a plane and three people are saved before they even get off the plane. Like he’s that guy. Rich Birch — Right. Jason Hildebrand — And, I you know, you kind of like, should I be that guy? Jason Hildebrand — And and I really, i I was in prayer one day and or I don’t even remember the exact moment of it. I just, I remember having this encounter with God where I felt like he spoke into my spirit stop trying to do my job, Jason. You’re not very good at it. Rich Birch — Oh, that’s so good. Jason Hildebrand — Like, like, like your job is not to do my job. Jason Hildebrand — Yeah. Like I, I bring the transformation. All you have to do is show up and allow my presence to co-create through you. Rich Birch — Right. Jason Hildebrand — And I thought, oh, wait a minute. Like, I don’t have to have all the right words and do all… No, you carry me. You carry me into the room. You carry me when you get on a set. Rich Birch — That’s good. Jason Hildebrand — You carry me when you’re on a stage. Like Christ in me, the hope of glory is the thing that’s transformational. Not Jason saying the right words. And it took all the pressure off. Jason Hildebrand — I thought, oh, wait, I’m built to be an artist. I can just be an artist. That’s enough. And that was like, and so whether you are, whatever you are, if you’re a woodworker, if you’re a teacher, if you’re like a doctor, whatever. I mean, I think it’s the same. We carry God into the room. Rich Birch — That’s good. Jason Hildebrand — And by our, you know, people we’ve been, we’ve been I don’t know if you have this, we’ve been talking through how do we communicate that on social media? And I, you know, I have this extraordinary new social media person. And and I said, if you want to know who I am, just watch my work. Rich Birch — Right. Jason Hildebrand — It’s there. Rich Birch — Right. Jason Hildebrand — That’s what it is And I think it’s the same with you too. you know If you want to know who you are, just listen to a bunch of podcasts by Rich. Rich Birch — Right. Jason Hildebrand — It’s like I know who Rich is right away. Rich Birch — Sure. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. So good. Well, I want to talk about kind of dance around this a little bit. Tell me about the screenings that… Jason Hildebrand — Sure. Rich Birch — So how how is this actually, you know, how are you rolling this out? Where can I, you know, watch this, that kind of thing. Talk us through that part. Jason Hildebrand — Well, we had a good long debate at the beginning of what to do with this and had a a lot of meetings with various ah distribution folks. And I had been feeling a big check in my spirit about throwing it up on streaming. Like, you know, there’s a lot of stuff on streaming. Some good, some not, but so much of it, even on on the major platforms, it just gets lost. You know, great films that get lost in the middle of nowhere. Jason Hildebrand — And you know we come from a theater background. And so we’re really interested in getting people together in community. Like that’s a really big deal for us because I think that’s where the transformation happens – in-person. Jason Hildebrand — And so we’ve kind of balked at putting it up on on any kind of streaming service because I just feel like it’s just like, ah, I can do that at the end of my night. But how can I gather people to have an encounter? And so I think inadvertently we did it. we’veve We’ve done, we’ve done a, you know, it’s, this is classic. Jason Hildebrand — It’s just so how God works with us. He’s like, you know, we just try it. Or he gives a suggestion. We try We go, oh, oh, that’s why we were supposed to do it. Okay. It’s like the worst, the worst strategy ever is like, you know, but mostly… Rich Birch — Love it. Jason Hildebrand — …well, I don’t know if the worst strategy, I think I’m learning to be like getting up in the morning and say, Lord, what do you actually want me to do today? But in the same way with this stuff. So we, we did it. We did a handful of, we did a handful of screenings so far and we’re about to do a Canadian tour and a European tour. Jason Hildebrand — But what we have found, Rich, which was the which was the epiphany for us again, was we invite people to a theater space, so like a movie so movie theater space or or a really interesting cool art space, something that’s like, non-churchy. ah Although, you know, there’s a lot of great churches that have these kind of environments. But in Canada, we have like smaller, smaller church, you know, communities, but so places that have a great screen and great sound. Because we shot in Scotland, so the landscape is extraordinary. And, and the score by Mike Jansen, who’s this incredible Canadian composer is, is I think, like Academy Award winning. The score is like, wow. Jason Hildebrand — So we got people together and then we got a local host, somebody that’s trusted in the community to just kind of invite people to a place to slow down. And a lot of times, both in my coaching and in in the work that we do, we incorporate breath, this idea of Ruach, the breath of God into our stuff. So invite people to slow down to breathe, to like turn off their busyness of their day, like just actually turn it off and to get present. Jason Hildebrand — And, you know, maybe it’s a 10 minute or so thing, but it really, it really sets the tone. And we invite people to encounter the story, to find themselves in the story, like I mentioned earlier. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. Jason Hildebrand — And then people watch the film. It’s just over an hour. And then one of our team, usually me so far, sits and we unpack it in a Q&A after. Rich Birch — So cool. Jason Hildebrand — And the question and and the people that have come are both people of faith and people who are completely outside of faith. Jason Hildebrand — And and the response. I really feel like my mandate is to create work for human beings, not for any particular stripe of person, because we all have the same need. Rich Birch — Right. Yep. Jason Hildebrand — We all need Jesus, but when we all need who God, we all need the Holy Spirit. But whether a person been walking with God for a long time or not walked at all, the need is still the same. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. Jason Hildebrand — To encounter God. Jason Hildebrand — And so, man, I, so it’s wild. I had I invited my, I have a Mini car and my mechanic, this 60-ish year old Scottish mechanic. Jason Hildebrand — And I’ve been talking with him as I’ve been going back and forth from Scotland about Scotland and whatever. And I invited him to the screening in Toronto. And he came with his girlfriend. And so I texted him the next day. I said, hey man, like, what did you think? He goes, what you and your team have built is so extraordinary. He said, thank you for allowing me to slow down and listen. Rich Birch — So good. Jason Hildebrand — He said, and then I was lost in the wind and the waves and I was overcome by everything. And I was like, what? Like, this is a no, this man, there’s no faith going on. Rich Birch — Yes. Love it. Jason Hildebrand — And interestingly, another, another person was there that I invited that actually makes, makes my glasses, made in Toronto, and incredible artist and like a entrepreneur, really great guy. And I said to him after, I said, wow, what did you think? And he goes, the thing that I noticed, Jason, was that people were hungry for what you brought. Rich Birch — That’s cool. Jason Hildebrand — And this is a person completely outside of a faith context. We have lots of really interesting discussions about faith, him and I. Jason Hildebrand — But I was like, wow, okay. And then those who have a faith context, it’s like all a sudden God goes, all right, we’re here. We’re going to go deeper. And I had the questions that come out of those folks are like deep in the guts, like, oh, wow. Rich Birch — That’s cool. Jason Hildebrand — And it’s been extraordinary. I like… You know when you you do something that’s more that’s more than the sum of its parts? That’s how it feels for me. Rich Birch — Yes. Jason Hildebrand — I’m like, this shouldn’t work, but it totally works. Rich Birch — Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Like on a piece of paper that doesn’t make sense. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Jason Hildebrand — Yeah, it doesn’t make sense. Rich Birch — Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Jason Hildebrand — So, yeah, that’s been that’s been it’s been wild. It’s been wild to watch it. Rich Birch — That’s amazing. I love that. And when I heard this, was like, I think that is the best way to present this kind of content that you’re, you’ve chosen to say, no, we’re going to really do like, it’s like uncomfortable. You’re forcing, we’re going to have to get it into, you know, live room with real people. Jason Hildebrand — Yeah. Rich Birch — You’re going to have to slow down. There’s a cost to that in just you know it’s it does not. Jason Hildebrand — Yeah. Rich Birch — It’s an ornery decision, which I love. I think it’s fantastic. Jason Hildebrand — Oh, thank you. Rich Birch — I think is like i think that’s i think that so so makes so much sense. I was thinking again about this. You know, we went and saw the Odyssey this summer. My wife and I went and saw that. Jason Hildebrand — Oh, yeah. Rich Birch — And, um you know, it’s one of those movies that like, yeah, sure, we could wait and, you know, whatever, get it on our streaming device. I’m sure they’ll release on streaming device. But there’s something about being in the room with other people. And it’s it’s not just the big screen. Jason Hildebrand — Yes. Rich Birch — There’s that kind of community experience of it. And I know this has a similar kind of feel to it. I love that. Jason Hildebrand — Absolutely. Rich Birch — So if I’m a church leader listening in, are you are you like partnering with churches to do this? Are there ways we could plug in with this? How does how does that work? Jason Hildebrand — Sure. I mean, we’re doing a Canadian tour of movie theaters right now. So, you know, we’re we’re we’re in the process of building national and regional sponsorships across the country. But our long-term goal is really to, you know, we’ve got both a film. And then we’ve got this immersive gallery, which is eight stations based on themes from the film. Jason Hildebrand — So like failure and loss and lament and family and the elements like, you know, the the physical elements outside wind and water and and such. And so, you know, that gets set up. you know, we in a for about a week and people can kind of wander through that at their leisure. Rich Birch — Yep. Jason Hildebrand — And then there’s a small group resource. So our hope, I think long-term after we kind of do this screening tour is really to invite church communities to utilize the whole package in a way… Rich Birch — Right, right. Jason Hildebrand —…to, you know, invite people to encounter the screening in a, in a big screen with great sound. And then for them to unpack the whole thing over the course of a week, people could wander through it in a, know, in a, in kind of a hall or a space, an art gallery, something you know connected. And then they could even take it to the next level by doing the small group resource. Jason Hildebrand — And we’ve incorporated some of those Psalms micro-films that I had spoken about into the into the resource as well. Rich Birch — Right, right. Jason Hildebrand — So you’re you’re encountering scripture. And both in the in the gallery and in the small group resource, one of the things that I was big on incorporating was a lot a lot of the small group stuff is very kind of intellectual, sit on the couch and think about things. And same with the gallery type space. Jason Hildebrand — And we wanted people, we you know, people learn in different ways. We wanted people to both have a contemplative experience, but also there’s doing, you have to do something. And so each station, there’s a doing. And in in the room when you’re doing the small group reserve, every week is you’re doing something. Rich Birch — That’s cool. Jason Hildebrand — You’re getting up and standing outside and putting your feet in the grass or like different things like that, which is which is kind of a sensory thing alongside of a visual thing. Rich Birch — That’s so cool. I love that. Well, if people want to, well, first of all, this has been a fantastic conversation. I’m sure there’s a lot more we could cover. Jason Hildebrand — Thanks Rich. Yeah. We could go for days, you and I. Rich Birch — And I, yeah, so good. But if, where do we want to send people… Jason Hildebrand — Sure. Rich Birch — …to kind of learn more? I really do want people, again, I think you would be served well to just even watch the trailer today, friends. But if people want to explore this a little bit more, where do we want to send them online? Jason Hildebrand — Yeah, absolutely. Well, theshepherdandthesound.com. You can check it out there. Jason Hildebrand — All on our socials, @PresenceCreativeArts or mine, @JasonHildebrand. And our website is PresenceCreativeArts.com. They can you can kind of on that site, The Shepherd and The Sound or on Presence, you can see kind of like a breakdown of the three things we’re working on. Jason Hildebrand — We’re also in the process of taking the original soundtrack by Mike Jansen and building an app that ends up being a contemplative space act or app built out of scripture and the music as well. Rich Birch — That’s so cool. Jason Hildebrand — But that’s that’s coming in the future. Rich Birch — Love it. So great. Well, friends, again, that’s, we’ll put links to all that, theshepherdandthesoundfilm.com. Again, I want you to go over there, check that out. You’ve got a, it’s hard to describe art in audio format. Jason Hildebrand — It’s so true. Rich Birch — It’s like, how do we, how do we talk about this in a way that will give you the sense of what it is? But hopefully we’ve done a little bit for that. Jason, I appreciate you being here today. Just want to honor you for the good work you’re doing. Jason Hildebrand — Thanks, Rich. Rich Birch — And thanks for taking time to be with us today. Jason Hildebrand — Appreciate you a lot. Thanks so much.

   September 10, 2026·46min
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   Number 2: From Imitation to Innovation: Finding Your Church’s Own DNA with Sam Hamstra

   Welcome back to another episode of the unSeminary podcast. Today we’re joined by Sam Hamstra, Lead Pastor of Anthem Church, a fast-growing, multi-ethnic and multi-generational church serving Northwest Indiana and Chicagoland. Anthem became an independent church in March 2020—the same week the world shut down—and has since grown to multiple locations and thousands of people. In this conversation, Sam shares how clarity around mission, values, discipleship, and vision has helped Anthem develop a distinct ministry culture and sustain healthy growth. Does your church know exactly who it is and how it does ministry? Are your leaders aligned around a shared playbook—or are you borrowing someone else’s model without adapting it to your context? Sam offers practical lessons on creating organizational clarity that shapes everything from calendars to leadership development. Move from imitation to innovation. // Sam is quick to acknowledge how much Anthem learned from churches and networks that came before them. But even before Anthem launched, he began recognizing that another church’s model could not simply be copied and pasted into Northwest Indiana. The local culture, demographics, ministry environment, and people were different. Healthy leaders learn from others while also doing the harder work of discerning what God is uniquely calling their church to become. Clarity takes courage. // Copying an established model feels safe because leaders can see evidence that it works somewhere else. Developing your own approach requires greater faith because the outcome is less predictable. Sam believes churches must have the courage to move into that uncertainty. Rather than endlessly chasing the next successful strategy, leaders should prayerfully identify the unique blueprint God has given their church and commit to it. Define your “way.” // Inspired by Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage, Sam and his leadership team spent roughly nine months working through five foundational questions: Why do we exist? How do we behave? What do we do? How do we live? Where are we going? Their answers eventually became what they call “The Anthem Way”—a framework that brings clarity to mission, values, discipleship, spiritual formation, and long-term vision. Mission and vision are not the same thing. // Anthem’s mission is to lead people to know Christ and make Him known. That mission remains constant because it flows from the Great Commission. Vision answers a different question: where is God taking this particular church? Separating those ideas has helped Anthem distinguish between the timeless calling of the church and the specific future they believe God is leading them toward. Let your discipleship pathway drive the calendar. // One of the biggest benefits of clarity has been simplifying Anthem’s yearly ministry calendar. Instead of allowing every ministry to bring new ideas and events to the table, leaders evaluate opportunities through their defined discipleship pathway. The result is greater focus and consistency. Sam says their annual rhythm has remained largely the same for years, helping both staff and attenders understand what comes next. Boring can be a strength. // Churches often feel pressure to constantly create something new, but Sam has learned that repetition can be one of the greatest drivers of health. Anthem maintains a weekly prayer gathering, predictable discipleship rhythms, and recurring ministry events rather than continually reinventing the calendar. The goal is not novelty. It is consistency around the few things the church believes matter most. Create intentional invite moments. // Anthem builds four major invite opportunities into its annual rhythm: Easter, a Summer Kickoff, Homecoming, and Christmas. These predictable moments give the congregation specific opportunities to invite friends and family. Sam has seen the church grow following these events because people know when the church is intentionally creating space for them to bring someone who may not normally attend. Values have to become behaviors. // Anthem’s core values include “We Love People,” “We Choose Joy,” and “We Bleed Passion.” But Sam emphasizes that values only matter when people can see them lived out. Loving people means creating a culture where people can belong before they behave. Choosing joy means approaching ministry with gratitude rather than obligation. Bleeding passion means refusing to settle for the status quo and remaining willing to change as God leads. Use clarity to protect multisite culture. // As Anthem expands to additional locations, the Anthem Way provides clear boundaries for what must remain consistent. Sam is not claiming Anthem’s approach is the only way to do church, but he does believe it is important for every one of their locations to understand and embody Anthem’s distinct way of doing ministry. That documented clarity gives leaders freedom while protecting the culture across campuses. Check out Anthem Church’s About page to see how their story, mission, values, and discipleship pathway fit together. You can also follow @SamHamstra and @ThisIsAnthemChurch on Instagram. Thank You for Tuning In! There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, but you chose unSeminary, and I’m grateful for that. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it by using the social media buttons you see at the left hand side of this page. Also, kindly consider taking the 60-seconds it takes to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, they’re extremely helpful when it comes to the ranking of the show and you can bet that I read every single one of them personally! Episode Transcript Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. Really looking forward to today’s conversation. This is a funny one because literally yesterday I was talking to a church in a coaching call. We were talking about this exact issue that we’re going to unpack today. They’re wrestling with these things. I know that this is going to help you. So you’ve tuned in for a great conversation today with Sam Hamstra. Super excited to have him. He and his wife, Taylor, they founded Anthem Church in March 2020 with a vision and heart to lead people to know Christ and make them know known. Rich Birch — Over the past few years they have seen this mission become a reality, continues to grow. It’s a multi-ethnic, multi-generational family made up of thousands of people from all walks of life in Northwestern Indiana, Chicagoland, and beyond. It’s one of the fastest growing churches in the country. So honored that you’re with us today, Sam. Welcome. Sam Hamstra — Rich, so honored to be with you. This is a full circle moment for me. I’ve been following you for quite some time. So super honored to be on your on your show. Rich Birch — Oh, come on. That’s I’m glad you’re here. We, we’ve got a lot to learn from you today. So March, 2020, it’s one of those dates that sticks in all of our brains. Cause like, we all know, what were you doing? March 15th, 2020. We all can say exactly what we’re, where we were. That’s a wild month to, to launch. Rich Birch — It’s funny because I keep bumping into people who are telling a similar story. They’re like, we started during the pandemic, right at the beginning, right after that sort of thing. Give us a picture today and kind of from that moment all the way on to today, kind of bring the story, bring us, tell us a little bit about Anthem. Give us a flavor of the church. Sam Hamstra — Yeah, so we currently today we’re headquartered in Hammond, Indiana, which when we say Indiana, different people have different thoughts. But we’re we’re actually butting up to Chicago. Rich Birch — Yep. Sam Hamstra — Joking around right now, we’re going to be the future home of the Chicago Bears soon. Rich Birch — Nice. Sam Hamstra — Yeah. But um yeah, so we’re headquartered in Hammond. Our second location is in Merrillville, Indiana, about 30 minutes from here. So currently um our family’s grown to about 2,500 people in English. And we also have a Spanish service as well. And God’s done a phenomenal work over a six-year time frame. Sam Hamstra — Yeah, so we did launch in March of 2020. Our first Sunday was the same Sunday the world shut down. Rich Birch — Wow. Sam Hamstra — And so the third week of March was our first service on the internet. Rich Birch — Dude, that’s amazing. Sam Hamstra — Yeah. Rich Birch — That’s incredible. Sam Hamstra — Yes. So in God’s divine plan, kind of underneath our origin story, we we were actually a part of a church in Tinley Park, Illinois. We were a location of that church called Christian Life Center. Sam Hamstra — And our senior pastor and I, Pastor Jerry McQuay, we had been having an ongoing conversation about him making us independent, which is a whole long story. And he decided to really lean into what he believed God was doing in our lives and in this region and made us independent in God’s divine plan. That started in March of 2020. Rich Birch — Wow. Sam Hamstra — And so we transitioned from being a multi part of a multi site church a location up to being independent in March. And yeah, we started with nothing. We didn’t have any cameras, didn’t have anything. I called our media guy and said, do you have anything at your house? And he brought it. Yeah. Rich Birch — What gear you got in your basement? Yeah, that’s amazing. Sam Hamstra — Yeah and he he brought a camera from his house. And yeah, that’s how we started. One continuous shot streaming online. And that was the start of Anthem Church in March of 2020. Rich Birch — Wow. Yeah, that’s amazing. Sam Hamstra — So God’s done a great work. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s incredible. That’s cool to hear and fun to see where it’s come, you know, since then. When you look back on that experience, you know, a lot of what you’re trying to define in those early days of a church, you’re trying to bring clarity to like, what is our approach? And part of what we do is you know, we there’s ah there’s, I think, some good copying and pasting. You’re like, hey, here’s the way they do it over here. Maybe we could try a little bit that. But then eventually you start kind of coming up with your own way. You kind of birth your own a approach, playbook, you might call it. Rich Birch — When did you start to feel… ah the kind of transition from, hey, I just want to do it like in this case, either CLC or another church over there. And you started to realize, hey, there’s something unique here at Anthem. And we got to try to define some of that. Talk us through maybe from um a timeline point of view or from a revelation point of view, like, oh, this is kind of things I started to see. Talk us through what that looked like. Sam Hamstra — Yeah, so about two years before we launched Anthem, God started to really kind of do a work in our heart just on unique DNA. And we were coming out of like heavily influenced by ARC, Church of the Highlands, and learned so much from there. Sam Hamstra — And we’re seeing just how like clarity really was so important on where we’re going. Sam Hamstra — And so we were coming in there and I just was really praying and seeking the Lord on, okay, this is great. But in our context here, there’s some some differences, there’s some nuances. Sam Hamstra — This is, um we’re over here. what What does this look like here? And so really took the foundation of that and started looking at what does this look like? So when we started Anthem, it was with the thought of, we really want to lean into this unique blueprint of how God designed us and what God has called us to here. Sam Hamstra — So it really started from the jump from from day one. And so but it was a couple years ahead of time to say, OK, this is great. Let’s let’s use this. Let’s we’ve been imitating. Let’s imitate now move to a little bit of innovation and what the Lord would have for us. Rich Birch — Yeah, and there’s obviously there’s like an art and science to that, right? There’s like the, the yeah, insert whatever church, Church of the Highlands is fantastic. They’re doing a great thing, but you’re not Birmingham, Alabama. And you know and so there’s cultural differences, there’s community differences, there’s different resources and all that. That’s like the kind of science-y part of it. Rich Birch — But then there’s the art part of it, which is a little bit more… like intuitives, it’s like vibes, that kind of thing. How did you discern, okay, what are those things that we should be thinking about that are different that you start, or maybe things you started to see, evidence you started to see like, oh, maybe this isn’t working, just importing. Was there evidence of that that you saw? Sam Hamstra — Yeah, so like, and it was like small things, you know, just on approach to Sunday service. Rich Birch — Right. Sam Hamstra — You know, like, hey, this is open door, we don’t do this on Sunday. And we had just been starting to see like pretty early on, we’re we’re reaching lost people through like a hard approach to the gospel. Sam Hamstra — And it was just like, it wasn’t really seeker sensitive. Rich Birch — Sure. Sam Hamstra — It wasn’t, not saying they are, but just, it was just a little bit different in in our context where people were coming from. On the multi-ethnic side, it was just some approaches being super intentional with sounds, sights, all of that in in our context. And so, and even on the discipleship model, you know, groups, what kind of groups are we doing? How are we setting these up? Sam Hamstra — And so it was definitely like these nuances in the different categories, I would say, of discipleship that we started to pay attention to. That that was really the start, I think, of innovating what we have now. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s cool. Why do you think so many of us just reach for someone else’s model rather than doing the longer, harder, deeper, like it’s more annoying work to try to define you know our own thing and and then ultimately to document it which we’re going to get to here. what What did you actually do to kind of try to codify that? But why do you think we avoid that as leaders? Sam Hamstra — Yeah, so I think on one end, what’s established, you can see that the model works. And so um there’s great success you’re seeing. I mean, it’s working everywhere. And so I think it’s safe. And so deep down, it’s like this is established. I see it work. And so I can kind of press play on this. And and I know to a level that this this works. Sam Hamstra — And so it takes courage to do something that you haven’t seen before. Rich Birch — Right. Sam Hamstra — And deep, deep down, i think in our hearts, to me, that’s probably foundational thing. It’s like, man, I haven’t really seen this so his is going to require some courage, require some faith to press into the unknown. Rich Birch — Right. Right. Sam Hamstra — And so I do think that unknown word leads to some different decisions sometimes. Rich Birch — Well, and your church is an interesting um example just because it’s grown so quickly. I, you know, even in the… the lead up to it, I was thinking about, you know, the word, the term church plant. Rich Birch — Like, I don’t know when that term, you know, I was talking with a church that had been around for 30 years and they’re a big church. They’re like 20,000 people. And they, the lead pastor was like, well, we still think of ourselves as a church plant. And I’m like, yeah, I don’t at some point you stop being a church plant and just be, you start being a church. Rich Birch — And I think actually this is one of those, one of those differentiations is when you start saying, okay, like we’re going to, we believe that kind of God’s called us to this unique thing. There’s something in there. You built something that I think you call the Anthem Way. Sam Hamstra — Yeah. Rich Birch — Walk us through what that is. How does it function? What is the Anthem Way? Help us understand that. Sam Hamstra — Yeah, so this was actually birthed in an odd place. I was reading “The Advantage” by Patrick Lencioni,… Rich Birch — Yeah. Sam Hamstra — …and he was talking about organizational health, and one of the keys is clarity. Rich Birch — Yes. Sam Hamstra — And I had I have kind of, I’m somewhat of a mutt in church in my upbringing. Rich Birch — Love it. Sam Hamstra — So I’ve been in a lot of different environments and seen to a lot of different things. And so it was really just kind of like looking like, how can we just be crystal clear on who we are, where we’re going and different things. And so I read that book and in that book, he actually laid out these questions that he was like kind of pointing to every successful organization needs to answer. Sam Hamstra — And Iwas kind of seeing that with some of the stuff I’ve been hearing. And I’m like, and there’s a couple of missing pieces for me that he pointed to that I thought was so important in church world that I would actually point to that have been some of the biggest things I think that have been what I would call probably the secret sauce of what we’ve seen as far as clarity. Sam Hamstra — Just the separation of something simple, but the difference between mission and vision, you know, why we exist compared to where we’re going. And so, yeah, I read that book and in there he laid out questions that you need to answer. I took that to our leadership team and we wrestled with these probably for about nine months. Sam Hamstra — I’m just going back and forth on wording, how we say things. question by question in five different questions. We answered those and we gave it a name called the Anthem Way. And so that was the foundation, but I want to give credit where credit is due. It came through the book, The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni. Yeah. Rich Birch — Yeah, no, that’s great. That’s fantastic. And I, you know, one of the things I love that you’ve hit on here is I’ve talked in other contexts that our vision, well, this is the problem with with vision, mission stuff is it’s like, first you have to have a conversation. How do you define vision? How do you define mission? Sam Hamstra — Yeah. Rich Birch — But the big thing that we’re called to, the big idea, it comes from Jesus, right? We’re supposed to reach people and grow them up in in in relationship with him. All churches should have that as their core. That is at the core of what we do. Sam Hamstra — Yeah. Rich Birch — But getting clear on how we do that, you know, these other questions I’m assuming has helped give you a bit of a more of an edge, something that’s a little bit different. Do you want to rattle through the five questions… Sam Hamstra — Yeah. Rich Birch — …and maybe some high level, I know we can’t get into all the detail, but kind of high level how you’ve answered it. And then the follow-up I’m going ask you is, which are those couple that have given you what you think are the biggest distinctives around Anthem… Sam Hamstra — Yeah. Okay. Rich Birch — …that kind of that that kind of, um you know, that provide that edge that’s a little different, you think. Sam Hamstra — Yeah. So five questions and I’ll rattle them off quick. But so first one is why do we exist? Mission – the mission question, um which you just said it, I 100% agree, you know, every church really is called to the same thing. Let’s make disciples who make disciples, the Great Commission is still our first priority. Sam Hamstra — And so the way we say that is to lead people to know Christ and make them known. That was something we just prayed into language. We want to share language that people could really rally around. Sam Hamstra — Next question is how do we behave? The values question. We wanted to boil down in our culture those not aspirational values like truly who we are. So we boil those down to three things and wrestle with the language a lot. We wanted them actionable, but we choose joy. We love people and we believe passion. Sam Hamstra — And those all have disclaimers and really feed into our culture of what we call multi-everything. We love people from all walks of life, belong before you behave, and all that falls in there. Sam Hamstra — What do we do? Patrick Lencioni was talking about how that’s really your your business definition, so to speak, not for external use, but internal. We answered that with, we provide defined discipleship pathway. Sam Hamstra — It’s what we do day in and day out. It’s why we wake up in the morning. We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel. We’re not a country club. We’re not here to make money, we’re a church and and this is this is how we do, like what we do to ah to reach our why. Sam Hamstra — How we live is the spiritual question for us. We wanna make disciples. So we wanted to be able to weigh spiritually what a disciple is. And so we looked at Acts 2:42, which we felt like was a really good, definition of these handles on a disciple. And so we have five kind of disclaimers on what we want to see in our people at our church. And we offer resources on those, but from daily devotion to prayer to we share our Jesus story. How do you testify? How do we share? How do we make Christ known? Sam Hamstra — And then the last one is where are we going, which is the vision question. And we’ve we’re wrestling with the timing right now. We currently have a 10 year vision statement, which is just kind of pointers on like, this is where we believe God is taking us as a people. Sam Hamstra — And so those five questions are give us the framework for what we call the Anthem Way. What I’ve seen, as basic as it sounds and in our context. And I don’t know if this resonates with anybody. One of the most frustrating meetings I had in church context was the yearly calendar meeting. Rich Birch — Yeah, so true. Sam Hamstra — And I just felt like everybody was coming every year with their own ideas. Some of them had to do with our mission, some didn’t. And these are just in past experiences. And so it just felt like everybody was trying to, and some, you know, just different reasons, good, bad, indifferent. Sam Hamstra — And what what gave me great clarity was to look at our defined discipleship pathway and say, this is how we create our calendar. And um that’s been one thing that has simplified everything for us. Sam Hamstra — So every year in the last six years, our our yearly calendar flow has been the same. And our people are starting to understand it. The next steps fall within it when we even, you know, baptisms, we’re doing it this time. And So that’s been one thing is basically that sounds like what do we do? Rich Birch — No, no, that’s good. I like it. Sam Hamstra — I found a lot of confusion on that in the past, on like, how do we do groups? How do we have services? To define everything within that in the discipleship pathway, to me has been life-giving, not only for us as a team, but as as our church as well. Rich Birch — Yeah. Pull that apart a little bit more. I think, because I think this is where we fall down on this type of work is, you know, and, and I know it’s none of the people that are listening in, but there are churches that like, they do a retreat and we’re like, we’re going away. We’re going we’re reading Lencioni. We’re going to define the five questions. We even make a snappy poster and we put it up on the wall. And then we go back to business as usual. It’s the same thing we’ve always done. But you’ve been able to make the connection there, particularly with the calendar. Rich Birch — Maybe talk us through, give us some examples of how this work is shaping, how you’re actually defining, you know, how you operate as a church. Sam Hamstra — Yeah, so one example I would say is prayer. I had somebody call me and I like to think our prayer culture is strong. And they said, how did you get your prayer culture strong? And I said, well, this is really mind blowing. We have a weekly prayer meeting. Rich Birch — Right. Right. Sam Hamstra — And so because of that, and and still as the lead pastor still today, I take responsibility for leading that because I believe it’s it’s a high value for the church. Rich Birch — Right. Sam Hamstra — So it’s on the calendar. We you know And we’re not adding to it. It’s just 6 p.m. to 7 every Thursday. And we support it, which I think is the secondary layer behind that because it’s important. Now we have staff support. We have worship team support. We’re, we’re like staying very focused, on a few things rather than getting broad and going to a retreat and saying, this is a silver bullet. I don’t think there, I think the whole thing is a silver bullet, the whole pathway. Rich Birch — Right. Sure. Sam Hamstra — And so we always say, you know, I took this from somebody, but, you know, we want to be Ruth’s Chris, not Ponderosa. We want a one page menu and we really want to just do that. Rich Birch — Yep. Sam Hamstra — And it might even get boring. And we we’re trying to learn that boring is good. Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah. Boring stuff grows churches. I love it. Sam Hamstra — Yeah. Rich Birch — One of those five is sharing Jesus. Every disciple has one mission, to make Christ known. We don’t keep the gospel to ourselves. We share it through our words, our actions, our lives, wherever we go. We carry the hope of Jesus to a world that needs him. Rich Birch — Unpack some ways that that value drives behavior at the church, that actually drives calendaring and and you know what you’re talking about, that sort of thing. Sam Hamstra — Yeah, so deep, you know, we always want to empower everybody to be inviters and not just share. I think the key word in that is share your Jesus story. You know, we have to be people who understand how to share a testimony outside the four walls with it, you know, with a pretty quick invite to be like, hey, come be part of this community if you don’t have a community. Rich Birch — Right. Sam Hamstra — And so that is really through calendaring. We that’s really probably intrinsically baked into what we’re doing. So anytime I bring a guest to church, I’m saying it from the pulpit. And this is my friend. They’re here. I invited celebrating those through baptisms. Sam Hamstra — We let people testify of so you’re hearing stories of that. And then really resourcing people to make Christ known by sharing their story, teaching them how to do that. Sam Hamstra — So In the context of the calendar, um you know I took this from your playbook, sir, so thank you. We wanted to create four big events in our flywheel… Rich Birch — Yep. Love it. Sam Hamstra — …that are big invite events, that these are the moments where you need to bring 10 people. Rich Birch — Right. Sam Hamstra — We have found in our calendar since day one that we are seeing people respond to that and our church grows after every single time we do a big event. Rich Birch — That’s great. Sam Hamstra — And so we’re we’re doing four quarterly things. Rich Birch — Are those are those four the same every year? Are they, are they, yeah. Sam Hamstra — Yeah, yes. Rich Birch — So what are they? What are those four? If you don’t want me asking. Sam Hamstra — So, you know, Easter, of course… Rich Birch — Yep. Sam Hamstra — …summer kickoff was something we just created… Rich Birch — Yeah, great. Sam Hamstra — …to start the first Sunday of June. We rented a football field and we just say, bring everybody. We don’t… Rich Birch — That’s great. Sam Hamstra — …in our culture here, this is one thing, like, we’re like, we don’t shrink in the summer. This is a great time to grow. Rich Birch — Keep going forward. Yep. Love it. Sam Hamstra — Yeah. And then we created something years ago called Homecoming, just, you know, it was really show up Sunday, invite day. Rich Birch — Yeah. Yep. Sam Hamstra — And then Christmas. Rich Birch — Love it. Sam Hamstra — So those are our four homecomings in November on the calendar. It just kind of flows quarterly for us that way. Rich Birch — That’s great. I love it. Well, I love what we’ve seen in fastest growing church in the country, friends that are listening in, is, you know, lots of churches will get, they have two big days, Christmas and Easter. But what we see is the behavior that you’re doing, which is you kind of end up having to make up a couple other days where you’re kind of injecting energy. We’re recording this in the summertime. You know, lots of churches have pulled a page out of Life Church’s book around At the Movies. And they, at the movies is one of their biggest attended days of the year on the the front end of that. Rich Birch — It’s just made up. There’s no reason for you to come the first week of August… Sam Hamstra — Yeah, absolutely. Rich Birch — …but they’ve decided, hey, we’re going to do that. That’s great. So we’re going to link to your about page where a lot of this is on that that page. Sam Hamstra — Yeah. Rich Birch — On the how our core values, how we behave: We love people. We bleed passion. We choose joy. There’s some unique stuff in there. So talk me through. We love people, I think could be universally true of lots of churches… Sam Hamstra — Yeah. Rich Birch — …but I’m not sure that every church would say we bleed passion. We choose joy. Talk me through those as how those are kind of a unique thing that is helping you define what it means to be Anthem. Sam Hamstra — Yeah, so you know on the love people thing, is you do hear that a lot. And I found there’s a difference between hearing it than living it out. And in religious environments sometimes, you know, I think we all pray we wanna reach the lost until you reach the lost. Rich Birch — True. Sam Hamstra — And our first service, our first Easter Sunday here, we only had one door into our auditorium. And I still remember we had the whole back of the auditorium smelled like weed. Rich Birch — Oh, wow. Okay. Love it. Sam Hamstra — And it was like this tense moment, you know, like of like, okay, this is what we pray for. Rich Birch — Yes. Sam Hamstra — And kind of diving deep into that. So we really own that language within that of we belong before we behave. And so we’re, you know, you can come from all walks of life and we believe Jesus died for all people. So we love all people. Sam Hamstra — And then the we choose joy… Rich Birch — I love that. Before we move on, the thing I love about that… Sam Hamstra — Yeah. Rich Birch — …that you’re calling out, that I do think is a nuance that we miss in too many churches, which is oftentimes we say we want to reach people. But what that comes with is messy pastoral care, hard conversations, stuff that doesn’t make sense, and long nights. Like, it’s just hard. Rich Birch — And, um you know, if you’re, it’s easy to reach Christians from the other church across town. It’s hard to reach people who don’t normally journey in this stuff. Sam Hamstra — Yeah. Yeah. Rich Birch — And I love I love that story, even of your opening weekend with the the smell of weed in the back of the room. Sam Hamstra — Yeah. Rich Birch — I love it. Sam Hamstra — Yeah. Definitely messy. Rich Birch — That’s great. Yes, yes, love it. Sam Hamstra — Yeah. You know, the “We choose joy” has just been, um i think one of the greatest testimonies we had was from somebody that just, it was their first time guest. So like, man, everybody feels like they’re the same here. Everybody’s so happy. And we just wanted to build in just this, we believe that, you know, joy should be a badge that every believer wears. It’s just been, you know, you go into the different environments and some people just, it seems like a chore to be alive. Sam Hamstra — And so we just wanted to drive in. This is a privilege to be part of what God is doing in the earth in this hour, even if it doesn’t look perfect. Rich Birch — That’s great. Sam Hamstra — And then with “We bleed passion”, um that’s really our way to say here, you know, if you’re looking for a place that’s content with status quo, you’re probably not going to like it here. We’re always going to be changing. We’re always going to be moving. We’re always going to be shifting. We always want to go with where the Lord is leading. And so we’re a sending church. Don’t get comfortable. There’s always going to be more services. There’s always going to be new churches. Sam Hamstra — So we tried to to really get that in the DNA from the front side. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. I love it. Rich Birch — I love that “we choose joy”. When I was at Liquid Church, are one of our three in this in this coupling was “Church is fun”. And you know the way we would talk about that is we would say, you know we we we say good news or we say gospel. We’re like, we should be gospel people or we should be good news people. Rich Birch — But what that actually means, how that actually should work itself out in our culture is when people interact with us, those people are a lot of fun to be around. Sam Hamstra — Yeah. Rich Birch — Because they’re redeemed people who have figured out, man, we’re following a God who loves us dearly. So what that should actually like, I love the way you’ve said it, we choose joy. Joy should be the natural outcome of our churches… Sam Hamstra — Yes. Rich Birch — …which is, again, that should not be rocket science, but it’s amazing how much that is a cultural difference or can be a huge cultural difference in many churches. Sam Hamstra — Yes. 100%. Yep. Rich Birch — That’s cool. So um you’ve been using this really throughout your how you develop leaders, how you onboard people, how you, you know, how do you come back to this time and time again? What are you using? How are you using these tools in your leadership development, in your raising up of volunteers, that sort of thing? Sam Hamstra — Yeah, so foundationally, I got to give credit where credit is due once again on this. I heard University of Kentucky’s baseball coach say this about culture, and it was like the best thing I’ve ever heard. He totally transformed his program, and he said it was culture at at the root of it. He said culture is every day. Culture is what you accept, and culture is what you reinforce. Rich Birch — It’s good. Sam Hamstra — And so we try to keep that in front of us as much as we can. It’s you know not something we just say we want to lead the way every day. So within these three, we actually just came out with 10 leadership values that all fit within those three… Rich Birch — Oh, that’s cool. Sam Hamstra — …that give a little more language to our leadership, like, you know, we love people, so we park in back. And so really speaking to the culture of, you know, we put other people first, we serve. Rich Birch — Oh, that’s good. Sam Hamstra — And so, you know, we try to outdo each other. You know, I park about a half mile away from church on Sundays. We don’t we don’t do pastor parking, you know, or anything like that. umAnd so just, it’s every day. Rich Birch — Yes. Sam Hamstra — We do a value at every single one of our pre-service huddles on Sunday. So we’re taking those three values every Sunday, one, here’s what we’re doing. Sam Hamstra — And then Leadership Pipeline, we implemented this two years ago and we’re teaching our Anthem way across the board to a new set of leaders three times a year. And so we really zone in on culture a lot. We’ve just realized people coming from a lot of different places and what makes our culture, our culture are these distinctives. And so we’re teaching those and then really trying to walk them out. And the best testimony we’ve been hearing is people say, yeah, we see that in the leadership of the church. So that’s been really cool to hear. Rich Birch — That’s really cool. I love it. And friends, this just reminds me of the like such a foundational thing we’ve all got to get right and work on and then repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. Rich Birch — We’ve got to keep on top of this language and and just come back to it time and time again. So you’re multi-site, you’re you’re going to launch more campuses down the road. Sam Hamstra — Yeah. Rich Birch — How does this tie into that conversation around, you know, there can be in you know, some multi-site churches, there’s like this tension of uniformity, you know, versus autonomy. And like, how how does that how does how does your thinking work out with the Anthem Way in multiple locations? Sam Hamstra — Yeah. So I want to preface this with I’m new, so I am figuring this out in real time. Rich Birch — Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sam Hamstra — I’m coming from from being a campus pastor to now being in the position I’m in. We’re two years into our first ah plant location campus. So and we’ve seen it be successful. Sam Hamstra — But what we’ve agreed on is we are going to be uniform in the Anthem Way. So we’re choosing uniformity and everything that falls within that box of the Anthem Way. Um, and so that has been like the running lanes for us to define what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, the way we talk, the way we move, our style of church, um, and all of that. So that’s been, you know, we’ve been really struggling with, with, with what you just said, that uniformity versus unity versus, you know, autonomy. Sam Hamstra — And so, the Anthem Way is to become our framework on how we’re starting locations. And we feel like as long as everybody’s in sync with all, and it and it entails a lot, right? I mean, how we do church, our approach to a lot of things. Sam Hamstra — And so that’s been that’s been our overarching theme is we want to be uniform in this. Rich Birch — yeah that’s good. Sam Hamstra — And so that’s what we’ve been trying to make sure it’s documented, ready to go. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, that’s an interesting, that’s like a, we could have a whole other half an hour just on on on that issue. Sam Hamstra — Yeah. Rich Birch — But one of the things we have seen over the long arc of the multi-site movement is churches that are choosing clarity and um and more, yeah, an understanding of, in your case, what is Anthem and how do we do what we do, those churches are the churches that, from my perspective, and not just statistically, are actually benefiting more from the multi-site movement. Rich Birch — The churches where they’re like, hey, let’s spend a lot of time. It can actually be the worst model because it’s like, we have a lot of people thinking about all the different ways you could potentially do church. As opposed to saying, no, no, like this is the way we’re not, we’re not saying this is the best way. We’re just saying it’s our way. We’re not saying that this is the only way to do it. Sam Hamstra — Yeah. Rich Birch — We’re just saying this is the way we do it. And, um and we’re okay with that. We’re settled on on that as an issue. Sam Hamstra — Yeah. That’s good. That’s good. Rich Birch — That’s interesting. Is there anything that changed or that has changed as you, I realize you’ve influenced ben to this from the beginning, but like, has there been anything that has kind of changed as you got clearer on the Anthem Way over the over the years? You know, something you cut or improved or, you know, is there anything that jumps to mind on that front? Sam Hamstra — Yeah, we’re would I might use the word refined rather than changed. Rich Birch — Sure. Yep, that’s good. Sam Hamstra — I was just talking to our discipleship director this morning just on, you know, is there is there a small group model? So like our three kind of handles in our discipleship pathway are know Christ, grow in Christ, and and make Christ known. Sam Hamstra — And, you know, our small group model isn’t working. We added what we call the Mosaic School of Ministry, which is is another thing in Grow. And we’ve actually seen way more interest and success in that. And so, you know, we have a way higher percentage right now going through what we call a School of Ministry, which is classes and and discipleship then we’re getting in small groups. Sam Hamstra — And so we’ve been just kind of wrestling with that a little bit. Like, is that culture, is it good, is it bad? And so I think those those refining moments have have really changed. We started off, though, I feel soft saying this, but it worked in our context. But we would start every year with 21 days of prayer and fasting in the beginning. And do 21 days again in the fall. Rich Birch — Love it. Sam Hamstra — We’ve actually gone down to seven days to start the year. There’s seven days in the fall. We just feel like we’re seeing actually better results with more people getting involved just with those minor tweaks, just to say this… Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. Sam Hamstra — …his is we’re we’re seeing bigger impact there. Rich Birch — Sure. Sam Hamstra — But so I think those refining things have been really good. Rich Birch — Has there been any of that refining that has come not from you, but from a member of your team? Like, has anyone called you out or called the church out on like, hey, like on prayer or on any of these where, you know, like when that’s happened in my life, I kind of like that. Sam Hamstra — Yeah. Rich Birch — I’m like, oh, well, that’s a pleasant thing that just happened there, even though it feels weird to be the person being called out. Sam Hamstra — Yeah. Rich Birch — Have you had any experiences like that? Sam Hamstra — Yeah. Yes. I’m laughing because, yeah, I’ve had quite a few. I could point to the one with prayer fasting. Rich Birch — Yes. So somebody on our team was like, hey, pastor, you know that there’s really no a place in the Bible where there’s a three week corporate fast. Rich Birch — Sure. Sam Hamstra — Yeah like where the whole church is coming together for three weeks and I’m like well I got a challenge, I’m gonna look. And I’m like sure enough you know, I’m maybe somebody could find it, but it was like these times and seasons where people come together for specific things of like, oh man you’re right. Rich Birch — Yeah. Yeah, love it. Sam Hamstra — So and so that was like one of those um yeah it’s it’s definitely happened quite quite a bit and so which I love that too and so it’s been such a blessing of solid team that feels free to speak when when they need to. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great. Well, this has been a good conversation, just as we’re kind of coming to land. If you think about a church out there that feels like okay they’ve listened to this and they’re like okay, we maybe they’ve opened up your website. And they’re like, hey, we’re not as clear on this that as we could be, we need to get much clearer on that. Rich Birch — What’s kind of one first step that you would encourage people to take? What would be kind of the best first step towards getting clarity on this front? Sam Hamstra — Write the vision, make it plain so that he that reads it may run. Rich Birch — Dude, I love it. And with that, we end the episode. That’s fantastic. No, that’s great. Unpack that a little bit. Sam Hamstra — Um, you know, I for so much of my life, I was always looking to be so unique and so different. Rich Birch — Right. Sam Hamstra — And I felt like I just needed the next best thing. And it was wasn’t until I just locked into this is what the Lord has for us. And it might sound like somebody else it might look and that’s OK, but this going to be very unique to us. And this is what we’re doing. And just to be very clear on that and then just this is for me, but I get bored so easily. And to just, just not get bored and just keep doing the same thing in the same direction day after day. Rich Birch — Right. Sam Hamstra — And in that that flywheel, to use your words, it does work. And just to see that go and to to get very clear and and simple and and let people know where you’re going and just keep saying the same thing over and over is so life-giving. Rich Birch — That’s so good. So good. Rich Birch — Well, I really appreciate you being here today. If we want to send people anywhere online to track with you or to track with the church, where do we want to send them? Sam Hamstra — So first name, last name would be all my personal stuff. So @samhamstra, last name H-A-M-S-T-R-A. Sam Hamstra — And all church stuff is weareanthemchurch.com. And then weareanthemchurch on social as well. Rich Birch — Love it. So good. Appreciate that, Sam. Thanks so much for being here. Honored that you take some time to be with us today. Sam Hamstra — Yeah, thanks so much, Rich, my honor.

   September 03, 2026·35min
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   Number 3: Your Bench Is Empty: What Growing Churches Do Before the Role Opens Up

   Most churches don’t start thinking about leadership development until a key person resigns. By then, the only real option is to post the role and hope someone qualified applies. In this special compilation episode, we’ve pulled together four conversations with leaders who have built the habit of developing people long before the seat opens up. The churches growing fastest right now are rarely the ones with the best job postings. They’re the ones who already know who’s next. Don’t miss the four critical lessons every church should consider as they head into fall hiring and budget planning. From the leadership model that quietly keeps benches empty to a mindset shift about where leaders actually come from to a challenge you could give your team on Monday to the structure that produces people you can genuinely put on payroll, each conversation offers a practical step forward. The Model Nobody Names Out Loud Tim Foot explains what he calls hero-driven leadership: the habit of relying too heavily on standout individuals to carry the mission. It produces short-term results, but it creates burnout, unrealistic hiring expectations, and fragile systems. What makes it so hard to escape is that it feels good. It feels productive to be the person who solves the problems and holds the answers. Foot also names the “shiny object trap,” where churches chase talent from larger organizations only to discover that the leader arrives with a playbook that doesn’t fit and no systems to support them. Key Takeaway // Hero dependence is a staffing strategy, whether or not anyone chose it on purpose. Healthy teams are built when leaders get comfortable saying they don’t know what to do next, because that’s what opens the room for collaboration. Listen to the Full Episode // Hero Dependence Is a Terrible Growth Strategy with Tim Foot (June 18, 2026) The Leaders Are Already in Your Building Spence Shelton draws a parallel most church leaders have never made. We all agree that growing a church by reaching lost people beats growing it by transfer from other churches. Then, when it comes to leaders, we reverse the logic and look for someone who’s already trained elsewhere. Shelton makes the case for the shoulder tap: intentionally asking someone whether God might be calling them into ministry. At Mercy Church, both executive pastors and two of three campus pastors came out of the marketplace, from banking, plant management, and physical therapy. None of them would have applied. Somebody had to ask. Key Takeaway // Many future ministry leaders never consider vocational ministry because no one ever raised the possibility with them. Developing from within takes longer than hiring from outside, and it produces leaders shaped by your church’s culture rather than someone else’s. Listen to the Full Episode // Stop Plucking Talent, Start Developing It with Spence Shelton (August 6, 2026) The Challenge That Costs Nothing Chris Vaught faced the constraint every growing church knows well. Connection Point was growing fast, but budget always arrives last, and southeastern Missouri isn’t a place people relocate to for a ministry position. So the church started looking at its own congregation and treating volunteers as unpaid staff with real roles and responsibilities. The starting point was a single challenge to every staff member: go find your Timothy. One person you invest in deeply enough that if you were out on a Sunday, the ministry would still run. Key Takeaway // A leadership pipeline doesn’t have to begin with a budget line. It can begin with one question asked of every staff member about who could carry their ministry if they weren’t there next weekend. Listen to the Full Episode // From 300 to 2,500: Building a Leadership Pipeline That Fuels Growth with Chris Vaught (September 25, 2025) Training Is Not Development Dave Miller draws a distinction that reframes what most churches call leadership development. Churches are excellent at training: the sermon, the class, the book of the month, the small group discussion. All of it is content delivery, and content has never been more available. Development is something else. Miller’s team identifies seven ingredients: training, spiritual formation, soft skills, ownership, mental wellness, and developmental conversations. He also challenges leaders on where accountability sits. When a sports team wins, we talk about the players. When it loses, we replace the manager. Church leaders should apply the same standard to the people they’re developing. Key Takeaway // If content were the key ingredient, leadership development would already be solved. What emerging leaders need is proximity, ownership, and someone willing to slow down and have the conversation. Listen to the Full Episode // Who’s the Next You? Building a Gen Z Residency Pipeline with Dave Miller (September 11, 2025) These four conversations form a ladder, and you don’t have to start at the top. Most churches never start at all because they assume the only real option is a residency program they can’t yet afford. Tim named the model keeping your bench empty. Spence gave the mindset shift and the shoulder tap. Chris gave the first move that costs nothing. Dave gave the structure that produces people you can hire. As you head into this fall, the question worth bringing to your next staff meeting is simple: who on our team has never been tapped on the shoulder, and what would it take to have that conversation this month? Thank You for Tuning In! There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, but you chose unSeminary, and I’m grateful for that. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it by using the social media buttons you see at the left hand side of this page. Also, kindly consider taking the 60-seconds it takes to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, they’re extremely helpful when it comes to the ranking of the show and you can bet that I read every single one of them personally! Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: TouchPoint As your church reaches more people, one of the biggest challenges is making sure no one slips through the cracks along the way. TouchPoint Church Management Software is an all-in-one ecosystem built for churches that want to elevate discipleship by providing clear data, strong engagement tools, and dependable workflows that scale as you grow. TouchPoint is trusted by some of the fastest-growing and largest churches in the country because it helps teams stay aligned, understand who they’re reaching, and make confident ministry decisions week after week. If you’ve been wondering whether your current system can carry your next season of growth, it may be time to explore what TouchPoint can do for you. You can evaluate TouchPoint during a free, no-pressure one-hour demo at TouchPointSoftware.com/demo. Episode Transcript Rich Birch — At the beginning of 2026, we surveyed executive pastors like you and nearly one in four named that staff health and structure, how we get our teams to work together was your top fear going into 2026. You know and I know it, you probably have an open role at your church that you’re trying to fill, or you’re maybe about to have an open role. When a key person leaves your team and your instinct is just to post it, what can we do? Rich Birch — Finding, releasing, equipping leadership is critically important. Welcome to the last compilation episode of summer 2026 here on the unSeminary podcast. Super excited about today’s conversation, all about developing leaders within our organizations. Rich Birch — I know that in many churches, we think of this as a season where new staff are hiring or we’re hiring them into new roles. We’re working on budget planning for next year. There’s all the fall ramp up. Rich Birch — All four of these conversations are going to be helpful for you. The first one, we’ve got Tim Foot. He is the CEO of Slingshot, has nearly 30 years in ministry leadership, and his team has literally worked with thousands of churches on staffing. Rich Birch — Listen to this kickoff to today’s conversation, really setting up the tension that we find ourselves in. He names the leadership model that most of us have absorbed without anyone talking about it out loud, and it could be derailing your church and my church. Let’s listen in to what Tim has to say about developing leaders. [Clip 1 Begins] Tim Foot — Yeah, I mean, the model we see is hero-driven leadership. It’s when we rely too much on individuals to actually carry the mission. And I think the cracks have happened. Tim Foot — I mean, we’ve seen it, Rich. You and I are similar ages. I think the cracks are happening generationally. Tim Foot — The builders and boomers were wired differently for a different time and culture. And us Gen Xers, we can code switch. I mean, we see that happening all the time. Tim Foot — And as we stepped into leadership, the cracks started to appear. I mean, we see it every week, another leader burning out, doing stupid things because of too much pressure. Then Millennials and Gen Z are now leading in a new way that we need to embrace. Tim Foot — And so I think we’re seeing those cracks around that hero dependence, and we’re starting to see the need more than ever to have a team awareness, a holistic approach, or we’re just going to have leaders continue to burn out. And we see it around unrealistic hiring expectations, lack of support for great leaders when they’re hired, a lack of development. Hero dependence is a terrible staffing and growth strategy and becomes a massive trap when it comes to a number of the key focus areas or patterns we’ve seen that healthy teams focus on a move mission forward. Rich Birch — Yeah, see, this is the thing when you I heard you say that once and it literally I sat up and I was like, oh, man, I’ve seen that in my own, you know, my own hiring. I’ve seen that in the way I’ve talked with, you know, I see the leaders around me. You see these people who they’ve kind of built the entire ministry around themselves and they’ve built it’s like it doesn’t work if they don’t. It’s like they’re such a unique individual. They have to lift it all. Rich Birch — Like, why do we keep coming back to that? Why? Even if we know like intellectually in our heads, yeah, that’s not a good idea. Rich Birch — But what makes that model so sticky? It feels like we just keep coming back to this same thing time. In fact, we actually reward it. We’ll be like, wow, isn’t that great? This person’s amazing. And we just kind of keep moving on. Why is that? Tim Foot — It’s the shiny object trap. I mean, the shiny object, aka the talented leader that we think is going to catapult the ministry. Often we see it in hiring conversations when a particular organization wants to go after somebody that’s been in a much bigger organization than them. Tim Foot — And often that person, if they can attract them, will come in with a playbook that isn’t uniquely suited to the organization they’re stepping into. Or there aren’t systems to support that new leader and the growth that’s going to happen. And burnout happens at every level. Tim Foot — But we both know, Rich, busy work makes us feel productive. But is it the right work? And we know that we can be ourselves the shiny object. It feels good to be the hero. It feels good to be the one that’s solving problems. It feels good to be the one that has all the answers. Tim Foot — And I think that’s one of the biggest threats in healthy leadership today, is feeling like you have to have all the answers. Because I think one of the most powerful statements from healthy leaders and healthy teams is, Hey, we don’t know what to do next. Because it actually opens up the room for new thought. It opens up the room for collaboration. And it opens up the room for teamwork. Tim Foot — But it’s easier to move quick. It’s easier to move quick and be surrounded by people who agree and play it safe. And then down the road, we realize that we weren’t growing in every sense of that word. And the mission was stalled out. Tim Foot — We know we often have to slow down, re-strategize, look at who’s around the table, work out how we work together to move faster in the long term. We have to be vulnerable to make a team work. And sometimes it requires us to actually help others win than focus on heroes. Tim Foot — I mean, you think about a winning sports team. It’s not about just one person out there doing all the work. We’ve got to work together as a team. Tim Foot — You know, it’s how do we work together and have less dependence on that shiny object, those standout leaders or those heroes. [Clip 1 Ends] Rich Birch — Oh, so good. You know, Tim named something there. Man, it feels good to be the person with all the answers. Rich Birch — Can I have a little confessional time with you, friends? Earlier parts of my ministry career, I have really struggled with that. I wanted to be the person who had all the answers, but it’s a trap. And most of us find ourselves in it. Rich Birch — We’ve got to move beyond hero dependence, either wanting to be the hero or to find heroes. It’s not a character flaw. It’s a system that ultimately rewards the wrong thing. Rich Birch — So the question that I have is what is the alternative? Where do we go if we’re not just trying to hire the next shiny object? Rich Birch — The thing that will, the person that will, you know, plug in like a thing, where do leaders actually come from? I love this conversation coming up with Spence Shelton as the lead pastor of Mercy Church in Charlotte, planted in 2015, now three campuses online, plus launching a family of churches. I want you to listen for a few things. Rich Birch — First of all, Spence parallels, makes a parallel that I really have not heard many people say between how we think about reaching people who are far from God and how we think about finding leaders and how these two are connected. Listen carefully for the shoulder tap that he talks about. You know, oftentimes one of the things I find most revealing about podcast interviews is people say things just in the sides that really do under that, that give you a sense of what’s actually going on under the hood and pay attention to where his executive pastor campus pastors come from. Rich Birch — Let’s listen in to what Spence Shelton has to say. [Clip 2 Begins] Spence Shelton — I think that mentality starts all the way down to the idea of reaching people that don’t know Christ versus just sheep swapping from one church to the other church, right? So you can grow your church by transfer growth, which I actually am one who, hey man, if somebody’s on the sideline in one church and then they plug into your church, I’m all for it. And if the same thing happens with Mercy, all for it. Spence Shelton — But our aim, what we all know as pastors and ministry leaders is our aim is, man, let’s reach lost people and then disciple them, right? The same thing I think should be true with leadership development. For some reason, when it comes then to developing leaders, we tend to go a different direction and think, well, let’s just go find where some leaders are and get them to plug in. Spence Shelton — It’s like, we don’t do that even with discipleship. Why are we switching our mindset? And so I want to just kind of, I have to, I was convicted and wanted to call our church and I would call others to the same mindset that you have with discipleship. Spence Shelton — Let that carry over into your leadership and your leadership development as well. And I think that’s how we’re going to grow, just as how we’re going to grow the kingdom by reaching lost people, how we’re going to grow the leaders in the kingdom, the number of leaders we have, it’s going to be developing them in our church. And I just, I don’t know that we’re even thinking that way and asking the question, is the guy who’s a 27-year-old physical therapist in my church, has anybody ever bothered to tap him on the shoulder and ask, Hey man, could God be calling you into ministry because I watch you? Spence Shelton — And no, we’re not doing the shoulder tap, man. And so, um, our right now, I just, I love it. I’m just a little bit of the story of our church. Our exec, both of our executive pastors and two of our three campus pastors were all in the marketplace. Spence Shelton — One of our executive pastors was in banking. Another was a plant manager. We have two campus pastors who were both, I use physical therapists cause they’re both former physical therapists. And you know, we’re sitting there having these conversations. You know, what makes a great pastor is someone who has sat with person after person, told them, Hey, you should do this to feel better. Spence Shelton — And then they come back to you later and say, Hey, I don’t feel better. And you say, did you do the thing I told you to do? And they say, no. And you say, well, you should have done that. Spence Shelton — And a patient long suffering physical therapist turns out to be a great pastor, but somebody has got to tap him on the shoulder and say, Hey man, I think God might be calling you into this. Spence Shelton — And so my, my encouragement to anybody who’s in ministry right now, kind of in that leadership development role. And you’re like, I don’t know, we’re going to have to go outside to find some talent. I promise it’s going to take longer the way I’m talking about. But if you will seek the Lord, ask the Lord, and then start shoulder tapping and giving some opportunities for guys to lead for men and women to lead there in your ministry and whatever the leadership roles might be. I think there might be more people in there than you realize, because I believe that God provides for the church that he’s growing, that he’s called you to lead. And so I think that’s true with leaders as well. [Clip 2 Ends] Rich Birch — Hey, friends, 9 out of 10 campus pastors, they do come from within. So if you are launching new locations in the future, man, we got to start developing campus pastors today. Rich Birch — But I know some of you are saying, listen, listen, listen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That all sounds good. Shoulder tapping. Great, great, great. Rich Birch — But how, how do I do it? How do I train my team to do it? How do we motivate, stay focused on this? Rich Birch — The gap that my, what I have found, it’s not desire. It’s not even understand that people don’t understand that that’s how we do it. It’s not a resistance to those things. It’s none of that. It’s just that nobody owns it because you see development is everyone’s job, which means that it’s nobody’s job. Rich Birch — It’s easy for this to fall through the cracks. Aren’t we all supposed to be developing leaders? So if we’re all developing leaders, my experience has been that means that really none of us are or we’re not doing it in a systematic way. Rich Birch — Super excited to have Chris Vaught with us. He is the lead pastor of Connection Point Church in Missouri. Listen, it grew from 300 people in 2011 to 2,500 today across multiple campuses. Rich Birch — And he outlines one challenge that Chris gave every staff member. And I really want you to listen carefully for this, because to be honest, this is pure unSeminary magic. This is like what I love about our podcast. Rich Birch — You could take this out of this interview today and put it into your next team meeting on Monday. Apply it to your church. Let’s listen in for what Chris wants to say to you about how we train people to shoulder tap, find leaders and release them. [Clip 3 Begins] Chris Vaught — You can only hire out so much, right? Because even though our church has grown fast, budget always comes up last. But you have to look at other avenues other than just, oh, I’ll hire another position. Chris Vaught — So we started looking at congregation. We began to develop our own leadership pathway or pipeline to develop not only volunteers, but our future staff. We knew we grew really fast. We need to hire from within, but we still couldn’t hire every position. Chris Vaught — So we started looking at our volunteers as almost as non-paid staff positions. And so we have an atmosphere of expectation of roles and responsibilities and also the value of what they’re doing. Chris Vaught — That the kingdom is dependent upon all of us using our gifts and talents. And so we started this pathway. And at first it was simply a challenge to every staff member. You go find your Timothy. You go find one other person that you can invest yourself into, a volunteer. Chris Vaught — So that if on Saturday night, and here was kind of the criteria for us: if on Saturday night, something were to happen and you catch COVID. Okay. We’re at that time. Could this ministry run the next day because of the person you have personally equipped… Rich Birch — I love that clarity. Chris Vaught — …to hold the ministry. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. Rich Birch — We began to put those pieces together. That’s right. You go ahead. I cut you off there. Chris Vaught — No, no. I was just saying that’s what we began. We began this pipeline and that was really the basic level at first. Every staff member finding that one Timothy, if you will, if you want to use that terminology, that could run that ministry if you were out. [Clip 3 Ends] Rich Birch — See what I told you? The Saturday night test is literally the cheapest leadership development tool in this entire episode. If you do nothing else out of today’s episode, do that. Rich Birch — But I know, listen, there can be a gap on that, a ceiling. Finding your Timothy fills gaps, but it does not produce people necessarily kind of week-in, week-out that you could put on print a payroll. You need to also do some development. You need to have some intentional leadership development. Rich Birch — Most churches, again, think that they’re developing leaders, but they’re really just handing out books or running a monthly team meeting, that sort of thing. I want to introduce you, reintroduce you to my friend Dave Miller. He’s a former worship and creative arts pastor in Las Vegas, in Kentucky, in Michigan, and he and his team have worked with over 150 churches and over 160 residents. Rich Birch — What do we mean by residents? These are people that are in the pipeline for thinking clearly in their lives about joining your staff team or staff teams of another church somewhere across the country. He defines seven ingredients. Rich Birch — Listen, I had the honor of writing the foreword to Dave’s book, Who’s the Next You? I would highly recommend you pick up a copy of that and think through that. But let’s listen in a little bit of what Dave has to say today. [Clip 4 Begins] Dave Miller — Well, we would say there’s seven ingredients. There’s a chapter in the book, seven ingredients. You can get it on our website right now. Dave Miller — Seven ingredients of what we would say is leadership development. So what you’re talking about, really, a sermon is training, if you think about it, like in a, in a market sense, I’m going to talk at you for 35 minutes. There’s four points. It’s very good. It’s inspired. It’s like Ted, Ted, long Ted Talk every 52 times a year, plus Christmas Eve and whatever. Dave Miller — And I would just say, we call that training. Churches for a long time have done really, really well with training, right? It’s either it’s the sermon or it’s Sunday school. It’s even the AI delivered small group questions I get from my men’s group, right? Dave Miller — It is staff. When I say, do y’all do leadership development? Yeah. Tell me about that. Dave Miller — And they start talking about your book or Carey’s book or Craig Groeschel’s book. It’s a book of the month. It’s conversation. Even now, now we’ve taken training and we’re still delivering the content, but we’re discussing it and we’re filling in blanks. Right. And we do that. Dave Miller — And, or spiritual formation. I had a well-known keynote kind of person. We just need to disciple these kids and get out of their way. And I was like, Oh, neat. Actually we don’t. Dave Miller — We did that once. It’s called the Jesus movement. I think that was the Jesus movement or the Jesus people in the early seventies, which kind of mirrors what’s going on on college campuses, you think. Dave Miller — We don’t need to just disciple them and get… We got to go with them. So, so training, spiritual formation, soft skills, which is the pain point of all the bosses, the emotional lack of intelligence of things. Those would be the three core ones. Dave Miller — And then we have to provide best practices. We have to, we have to provide ownership, which is a big thing for us in our small business, small church world at the 12 month mark. When we’re saying, well, she just doesn’t get it. She didn’t get, Oh, what doesn’t she get? Dave Miller — He just doesn’t understand what… We talk about our downline people as if they’re executive leaders with 20 years of experience. It would be totally fine for someone to accuse me of something like that. Dave Miller — But like when we think of sports, we don’t talk about individual players. We talk about the coaches. When the team’s losing, whose fault is it? As a lifetime Cincinnati Reds fan we change the manager. We don’t talk about number 78 and 14. Dave Miller — When the team’s doing amazing, it’s about the player.He’s killing it. She’s killing it. He’s killing it. When the team is losing, we have to own it similarly. Dave Miller — This is on us. Rich Birch — Wow. Wow. Dave Miller — Mental wellness. One of the seven things, mental wellness. If you can’t prove to me that you know, I’m not, I’m not here giving you even a theological construct. Cause we work with all sorts of churches that believe all sorts of things, right? But mental health, if you can’t prove to me that you have a plan, at least, or you’ve thought about it, that’s gonna be a problem. We’re checking it on. Dave Miller — And then finally developmental conversations. This is not delivered only through training to your point. [Clip 4 Ends] Rich Birch — What a fantastic group of conversations. Just a thin slice of so many of the conversations we’ve had over the last year in this whole area. Rich Birch — Tim, he named the model that can keep your and my bench empty. Spence gave us the mindset shift and the shoulder tap. Chris gave us the simplest form of the really first move that costs you absolutely nothing. And Dave finally gave you the formal structure that produces people you could hire, put on your team long-term. Rich Birch — Listen, you do not need to start at the top. Most churches never start at all because they only think the real option is just going out and hiring people externally. Listen, really the question I want to leave you with is where Tim started us at the beginning. Rich Birch — Maybe dear listener, you are listening in today and you have the hero mindset. Maybe you need to start with you and figure out what you can do in your area to pass it all along. Listen, we’ve got links for all these four episodes in the show notes here at unSeminary. Rich Birch — We’re on a mission to help 100 churches grow by a thousand people. We do that through these free podcasts, courses, coaching, cohorts. We do a lot to try to get in your corner. Rich Birch — We’ve got so much coming up this fall. Stay tuned. Some great stuff coming your way to see your church be more effective. Rich Birch — Thanks so much, friends. Take care.

   August 27, 2026·22min
   Play
4. 4
   Number 4: Why We’re Working Harder and Spending More to Reach Fewer People with Todd Wilson

   Welcome back to another episode of the unSeminary podcast. Today we’re joined by Todd Wilson, co-founder of Exponential and a leader at Multipliers, where he helps churches and ministry leaders pursue multiplication and greater Kingdom impact. Todd has spent decades studying church planting, disciple-making, and movements, and his latest book, How Did We Get Here? Looking Back to Look Forward, explores the evolution of the American church growth movement and what it may mean for the future. Are churches working harder while reaching fewer people? Have our systems become better at producing activity than disciples? Todd challenges leaders to examine the operating system beneath modern church ministry and consider what needs to change if we want to see true reproduction and multiplication. We have a disciple-making problem. // For years, Todd has championed the goal of seeing more churches reproduce. Research once showed that fewer than 5% of U.S. churches were reproducing, and while that number has improved, multiplication remains rare. But Todd believes church planting is ultimately an outcome of a deeper issue: most churches do not have a functional culture of disciple-making. If disciples aren’t reproducing disciples, churches will struggle to reproduce churches. Reproduction has to become generational. // Multiplication begins when reproduction continues beyond the first generation. One disciple makes another disciple, who then makes another, and the process keeps going. The same is true with churches. A church plants a church, which plants another church, which plants another. Once reproduction moves across multiple generations, addition becomes multiplication and the potential for movement begins to emerge. The church growth system has slowly changed. // Todd’s research traces roughly 75 years of church growth history, beginning with missionary Donald McGavran. McGavran originally studied why some churches on the mission field grew while others did not and developed principles aimed at helping missionaries reach more people. Over time, those ideas moved into the American church and blended with seeker-sensitive ministry, the megachurch movement, purpose-driven strategies, multisite, church planting networks, and other innovations. Much good came from these eras, but Todd believes the system gradually shifted toward institutional and programmatic growth. Good intentions can still create the wrong outcomes. // Todd is careful not to blame previous generations of church leaders. Many of the people who shaped modern church ministry were deeply evangelistic and sincerely wanted to reach people. Yet over time, the dominant definition of success increasingly became bigger attendance, larger programs, and expanding organizations. The unintended result is a consumer-driven model that can attract people effectively but struggles to produce disciples who reproduce. The angst leaders feel is real. // Todd hears a growing frustration among pastors: churches are spending more money, employing more staff, and working harder while seeing less fruit. Even churches that appear successful can sense something isn’t right beneath the surface. Todd believes much of that angst comes from trying to produce multiplication through an operating system designed primarily for addition. Naming the problem is an important first step toward changing it. Leaders must model what they want reproduced. // Todd believes transformation has to begin with senior leaders. If disciple-making is going to become the church’s growth engine, lead pastors and elders must personally participate in a simple, reproducible disciple-making process. Rather than merely preaching about discipleship, pastors should be able to name the people they are actively discipling and allow those relationships to shape the way they lead and teach. Keep the process simple and reproducible. // Whatever model a church chooses, Todd believes it must be simple enough for anyone to reproduce. The goal isn’t another sophisticated program but a way of following Jesus that can move naturally from person to person. The same approach should work for a lead pastor, a volunteer, or even a teenager. Simplicity increases the possibility of multiplication. Give the next generation permission to experiment. // Todd isn’t calling churches to abandon everything they’ve inherited. Instead, he encourages leaders to learn from the past, retain what is fruitful, and recognize that the current operating system may be losing effectiveness. Churches should create space for younger leaders to experiment, learn, and discover more reproducible approaches to disciple-making without being forced to preserve every assumption of previous generations. To learn more about Todd Wilson, visit multipliers.org. You can also download a free PDF or audio version of How Did We Get Here? Looking Back to Look Forward at church-growth.org or pick up a paper copy on Amazon.com. In addition, check out Todd Wilson’s conversation with Carey Nieuwhof, and the interview A Simple & Scalable Way to Reproduce Christians with David Putnam. Thank You for Tuning In! There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, but you chose unSeminary, and I’m grateful for that. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it by using the social media buttons you see at the left hand side of this page. Also, kindly consider taking the 60-seconds it takes to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, they’re extremely helpful when it comes to the ranking of the show and you can bet that I read every single one of them personally! Lastly, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, to get automatic updates every time a new episode goes live! Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: Portable Church Your church is doing really well right now, and your leadership team is looking for solutions to keep momentum going! It could be time to start a new location. Maybe you have hesitated in the past few years, but you know it’s time to step out in faith again and launch that next location. Portable Church has assembled a bundle of resources to help you leverage your growing momentum into a new location by sending a part of your congregation back to their neighborhood on Mission. This bundle of resources will give you a step-by-step plan to launch that new or next location, and a 5 minute readiness tool that will help you know your church is ready to do it! Click here to watch the free webinar “Launch a New Location in 150 Days or Less” and grab the bundle of resources for your church! Episode Transcript Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. I am so glad that you have tuned in today for this reason, friends, lean in. um I want you to be a part of the conversation that we’re having today. The leader that we’ve got on the phone, on the I don’t know why say the phone because we have not been on phones for podcasts in, you know, 10 years, but on the line is really pressing on an issue that I know that a large portion, you know, almost 90 percent of the churches in the country need to be doing what we’re talking about today. And they’re not. And I really want you to lean in and learn from Todd Wilson. Rich Birch — If you do not know Todd Wilson, he has been the founding and co-founding member of a number of faith-based organizations, including Exponential and Multipliers. He has designed a number, and been a part of the launch of a multiple of national church planting networks. He’s currently a team member, or team leader at Multipliers and serves leaders and ministries who are pursuing multiplication, helping them develop vision and strategy ultimately for a 100 X impact. You know that I love that. Rich Birch — Recently, he wrote a book that caught my attention that I want to dive in on and kind of um unpack some of the core lessons for us today. It’s called, How Did We Get Here? Looking Back to Look Forward. And it’s really looking at the whole conversation, American church growth movement. Todd, welcome to the podcast. So glad you’re here. Todd Wilson — Rich, it’s great to be here with you. I’m really looking forward to this conversation. Rich Birch — Yeah, me too. So why don’t we start with kind of giving us a picture of Multipliers and the work that you’re focused on now, kind of set the context for us. Todd Wilson — Sure. It’s probably good to have the context, you know, at at my core, my own personal calling. I am an entrepreneurial engineer at my core. I love to envision, envisage opportunities, seek strategies and opportunities of the future. And so where I like to do it anywhere, there’s potential for a hundred X kingdom impact. And that’s what gets me in trouble often is the, wherever there’s potential for a hundred X kingdom impact. Todd Wilson — When I came out of the marketplace over 25 years ago into full-time ministry, the most natural hundred X place for me, in addition to being in the local church was, was church planting. I was just drawn to church planting. I got to spend almost 20 years, ah you know, leading Exponential and co-founding there. Todd Wilson — And in recent years, really trying to get even more focused really on the 100x impact. I want to spend my next decade as I’m getting older here, you know, what’s it look like for every hour, for every dollar, for every bit of energy, to see 100x return. Todd Wilson — And so the idea of Multipliers, and it’s a small team of us that, you know, we have a definite bias within the kingdom space to the disciple-making as the mission and engine of the church. And what’s it look like to get back to Jesus style disciple making. But then church planting and multiplication, what does it look like to be doing things that that are even capable of reproduction that can lead to multiplication and ultimately movement. So our goal is to just help champion at the personal level through personal calling, at the church level through disciple making and cultures of disciple making that can ultimately produce movements. Todd Wilson — And so we are a champion and advocate for that. Rich Birch — That’s fantastic. You and I are are similarly wired. And over the years, you know I’ve heard people talk about, you know, and they always they’ll do like a series at a church on spiritual gifts. And I’ve often wondered because of the kinds of things I’ve been involved in, if, you know, if I have some sort of apostolic gift, just because of the stuff I found myself doing and, you know, launching campuses and all that. Rich Birch — And it’s interesting that gift over the years I’ve heard, which is similar to the kind of work you’ve been doing over the years is the only gift that I’ve ever noticed that preachers, they seem to talk down about it. And they’re like, stop starting things like, you know, they’re like, they always, you know, are like on the negative side of, you know, being the guy who wants to be entrepreneurial and see new things. Rich Birch — And that’s a part of what I admire about you and the good work you’ve done. When you were at Exponential over those, you know, with you that you co-founded, you know, that almost 20 years, you know, they had this, they saw some amazing things happen there under your leadership, where this idea of moving church reproduction from under 5%, really trying to push us towards 16%. Rich Birch — So for people that are unaware of this, I think this is good context to kind of take a step back and talk about why that number, why are we actually, why are you giving decades of your life towards this idea of trying to move towards 16%? What do we mean by that when you you know talk about that? Because I think that’s a good foundational idea for today’s conversation. Todd Wilson — Yeah. I think it’s important it to understand, again, context for me. I didn’t grow up a Christian. I never had a dream to be in full-time vocational ministry. I’ve never wanted to be a lead pastor of anything. You know, ministry was the farthest thing from my mind growing up. When you’re asking kids, what do you want do when you grow up? Todd Wilson — So when God brought me into full-time vocational ministry, and I’m going to say kicking and screaming, I wanted to go start a company. I wanted to go make money. I wanted to go change the world. And so coming into full-time vocational ministry, why in the world would I want to see anything except movements happening? Rich Birch — That’s good. Todd Wilson — We read about movements in the New Testament. Why do I want to be personally satisfied if God’s calling me into a new life of ministry with anything less than seeing movements? Todd Wilson — And so that was my context of stepping in and and leading at Exponential and what was driving us. And your question from 5% to 16%. Well, Houston, we have a problem. Todd Wilson — If movements are multiplication, and multiplication is generational reproduction, and we, at the time we were starting Exponential, there were less than 5% of U.S. churches were reproducing. You just got to let that sink in. Rich Birch — Yeah. Todd Wilson — 95% of churches just 25 years ago, 95% of churches in the U.S. are not reproducing. It’s physically impossible, both mathematically and biblically, to see multiplication and ultimately movements if less than 5% of churches are reproducing. Todd Wilson — So the answer to where’s the 5 to 16, for me personally, God’s called me into a new life and a new ministry. I don’t want to be satisfied with just status quo, but the state of the U.S. church is such that we physically can’t see 100x impact in the operating system of how things are working. Todd Wilson — So the 5 to 16 was very simple. Let’s measure where we’re at. And so the 16% sociologists say that if you can get 16% of an audience acting a certain way, behaving a certain way, it will become normative for everyone else. I like to say, if you’re in a room and you start quacking like a duck to talk, if you can get 16% of the people in the audience quacking like a duck, then everybody’s going to communicate by quacking like a duck. Rich Birch — Right. Todd Wilson — And so it just became a conviction. Let’s move the needle from less than 5% to 16%. And then the language we would use is, at 16%, healthy church reproduction would become such a normative thing that we would see multiplication happening. Todd Wilson — Now, the little bit of an elephant in the room before we move on, church planting is just the outcome. So that 5% number, it’s an outcome of the system and what’s happening. Rich Birch — Right. Todd Wilson — The more ornery number is that the national studies that we did on what percentage of U.S. churches have a disciple-making culture. That’s also less than 5%. Rich Birch — Right. Todd Wilson — So 95% of churches don’t have a functional mission of disciple-making, and that’s their normative growth engine through disciple-making. So in reality, we have a disciple-making problem, not a church-planting problem. And so those two became very tied together, as as will become evident as we have this interview. Rich Birch — Yeah, absolutely. and And just can you define generational reproduction for folks that are listening in? When you when you when you say that, like, hey, we’re trying to move churches towards generational reproduction, kind of just unpack that a little bit more. Todd Wilson — Yeah, let’s let’s start at the personal level of disciple-making. If one person makes a disciple of another person, you’ve got one generation. If that person goes on to make another disciple two generations, that person makes a disciple three generations. We see that biblically. We see that in the leadership pipeline with Paul, that you know we need to see disciples who make disciples who make disciples. Todd Wilson — Once you get to the third or fourth generation of something reproducing itself, if you drew that on paper, one becomes two, two becomes four, four becomes eight, eight becomes 16. That is an exponential or a multiplication curve. So all you have to do to go from addition to multiplication is have healthy reproduction broad and wide multiple generations into the future. Todd Wilson — Now we just take that to the church level, a church that plants a church that plants a church that plants a church broad and wide. Todd Wilson — Now you’ve gone from one church to 16 churches. And now look at the collective attendance of those 16 churches. That’s what you call healthy growth. That’s what you call multiplication when you keep reproducing it over and over. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. And there’s actually been progress against this. This is one of the things that I’ve loved as a person just sitting on the outside looking in as you and the team, you know, Dave and the broader Exponential community have really been hammering away at this. You know, we’re not at 16% yet, but we’re seeing progress, which is which is amazing. Todd Wilson — Right. It’s in the studies that we did, and it’s been repeated a couple of times, the needle has moved to at least 7%. That may not sound like a lot, but if you go take the number of churches we’re talking about… Rich Birch — Yes. Todd Wilson — …and that needle moving from less than 5% to 7%. And we’re not taking credit for all that at Exponential. Rich Birch — Right. Todd Wilson — We’re getting to ride a wave that really started around 2000. Prior to 2000, denominations planted churches, not really churches or networks. We saw the birth of networks around 2000 in the U.S. It’s hard for people to realize, but like in the church planting world, groups like City to City and GlocalNet and Acts 29 and ARC and Church Multiplication Network and Stadia and New Thing Network, none of them existed. Rich Birch — Right. Right. Todd Wilson — Literally in a five-year time period, we saw the birth of all these church planting networks, and that happened to coincide with that we saw that need to start Exponential to serve those networks. Rich Birch — Right. Todd Wilson — So We we were a little bit the right group at the right place, advocating for the right thing. Todd Wilson — And I do think that generally the the wonderful thing is that as that needle is starting to move and the visibility is getting more and more, the next generation wants it. Rich Birch — Yes. Yeah, I would agree. Todd Wilson — They want the scorecard of that. So I feel very optimistic that we’re still a ways away from 16%, but the needle is moving in the right direction. Rich Birch — Yeah, I would echo that too. I think there is, um you know, one of the couple years ago, I had one of those ages in my life flip over with zero on the end that you kind of notice and you reflect back on life a little bit. And I would say one of the things I’ve noticed over, you know, almost 30 years of ministry is this issue is has become more normative. Like it’s it’s a part of the conversation. It’s not that everyone’s doing it, but it’s in the dialogue, which I think is is wonderful. Rich Birch — Well, I, so you know, there’s, you interact with a lot of church leaders across the country. You interact with a lot of people, you have a pulse on a lot of, you know, what’s going on. And there’s a growing sense, you have flagged that there’s a growing sense among leaders that there’s just something wrong. It’s like, you know, there’s like a stink in the bottom of our, our, garbage that’s like, oh it’s a little bit stinky. It’s not like overwhelming, but we can’t put our finger on exactly what that is. Rich Birch — They can’t necessarily name it, but we feel it. We kind of see that there’s maybe something in the way we’re doing what we’re doing that isn’t working. What are you hearing as you sit across the table from church leaders in across the country, you know, around all of these things that we’re talking about? Todd Wilson — Let me describe it a couple of different ways. I think the the word I would put on it is an angst. I think if you look at the definition of an angst, there’s a there’s a growing and an underlying angst. um I’m going to say, if I’m descriptive of the angst, that might not be the way people would exactly say it but it’s how I translate what I’m hearing. Todd Wilson — We are working a lot harder to reach less people and we don’t like the cultural Christian product we’re getting. We’re working a lot harder. We’re spending more money to reach fewer people. And we’re just having this angst that the product we’re producing is a little bit too much consumer cultural Christian as we’re working harder and spending more money. And that leaves somebody full time, know, if I mean, if you’re a full time vocational pastor, there’s an angst that sits in the middle of that dynamic going on. Todd Wilson — My mentor and friend, Robert Lewis, who led Fellowship Bible Church in Little Rock for years, Robert’s handed off the leadership back in 2005. Robert describes it this way. He did the foreword on my recent book, and when he read and reviewed the book, he said, Todd, oh my goodness, this is first and foremost a walk down history lane. It’s like going back and looking at history. Todd Wilson — But he said, here’s the thing. I had this angst in 2005. Everything was up and to the right. We were growing. We were doing new campuses. We had started a church planting. Like we’re doing all of the stuff. People are turning to us. They’re looking at what we’re doing. We had started a leadership conference. And I just had this angst that something wasn’t right. Todd Wilson — And he said, I couldn’t name it. He said, I needed a therapist. But where does a megachurch pastor who’s having nothing but success with up and to the right, who’s feeling angst about the system, where do you go for therapy in that? He’s like, I didn’t know whether to feel like I was being ungrateful or what. Todd Wilson — And his words were, as you’ve traced the 75 years of the church growth movement and its evolution into a consumer-driven operating system, you have named my angst. I wish I would have had this book in 2005 to name my angst because half the battle is getting our hands around understanding why we’re feeling the way we do. Rich Birch — Yeah, I was talking to denominational leader within the last year to kind of add a bit more flavor even to that angst, who was saying, and this is a fantastic denomination, you know, Jesus loving, you know, fantastic group of people um and have, you know, very similar what you’re saying, like lots of good things going on. Rich Birch — And this was one of those like, After dinner conversations, you know, long ah a long ways away from a bunch of leaders, we were just chatting on the sideline. And he said, you know, the interesting thing, when you look at our tribe, his movement, he rattled off all their stats. We have a certain number of churches. We have a certain number of pastors. We have a certain number of, you know, baptisms every year. It rattles all that off. Rich Birch — And he said, you know, if you were to look at where we were 20 years ago, the number of churches is the same, the number of, and rattled off all these stats that are the same. Like we’re baptizing the same number of people, the attendance is the same, the the like all these things. He said, the only thing that’s gone up in the last 20 years is we’ve doubled our staff head count. There’s twice as many staff today as there was. And when I read, heard about your book and you talk about this angst, I was like, ooh, that’s exactly what he was describing. He’s like, wait a second. what’s happening here. And him as a denominational leader, he had the same read, hey, there’s something wrong with the way we set this thing up. Rich Birch — So your book, let’s actually dive into a little bit. It starts really at 70 year arc from Donald McGavron from 1955, all the way to today. And so for a leader who’s never really stepped back and thought about the history of like, what, how did we get here? It’s the name of your book. Why does knowing what got us to where we are today, this kind of consumer operating system that you describe, why does, how does understanding that help us as we think about the future? Todd Wilson — It’s a really good question. And I’m not sure, honestly, that I when I, when I set out to write this book, that, that that was even driving me to begin with, but very quickly that became the, I realized that’s why I need to write this book. Todd Wilson — So let, let me explain. And I need to give you a little bit of background to explain, because it’s an important question. Rich Birch — Yep, yep, for sure. Todd Wilson — So when I think about the moment that, that I realized we had a problem. Like that that, okay, we’re on this trajectory, things are moving the right direction to the 16%, and I’m back in the leadership of Exponential now. And I’m realizing, oh my goodness, we really do have a problem. And here’s here was what that looked like. Todd Wilson — I believed we had started learning communities and we had very vibrant learning communities And our learning communities got started because we felt like we need to shift the paradigm of people’s measure of success in the scorecard of church. It was very much about we need to shift paradigm. Alan Hirsch was involved with this on how do we shift from just growing large things to growing decentralized things that saturate. And it was very much about scorecard. Todd Wilson — And if you think about it, we’re wanting to move the needle from 5% to 16%. That’s a scorecard thing. So our initiating event was scorecard. But as we got into these learning communities, which in my opinion were the best things we were doing at Exponential. I mean, they were six to eight month learning journeys and we would rock people’s paradigm. Todd Wilson — We really would. People would go through it and be like, Oh my goodness, I got to have a different view of success in the church. Rich Birch — Right. yeah Todd Wilson — And guess what? They’d go home and Sunday’s coming. Rich Birch — Right. Todd Wilson — There’s, services to run, there’s people to pastor, there’s things to do. And the aha moment for me came, Rich, when I realized the the whole definition of insanity, that if you just keep doing the same thing over and over and hope for a different outcome, but that’s insanity. And here I am trying to lead a national organization to see a change in scorecard to move the needle to 16%. Todd Wilson — And I remember the day that I realized we’re not going to get there with the operating system we have in place in church right now. This operating system is not capable of getting us to the 16% number. Todd Wilson — That was a personal crisis. I’m leading an organization that’s up and to the right that the needle is moving. But as a futurist, I’m realizing we’re not going to get where we need to be with the operating system in the church. So the the operating system part was what drove me to start writing this book. I’ll let you ask a question there, and then we’ll circle back to the how does it relate to understanding how we got here, though. Rich Birch — Yeah, so ah just to underline what you’re saying there, um you know in in other conversations, I’ve heard leaders say, you know it’s like, um you know what you know what you reach people with is what you end up keeping them with. And so if what I hear you saying, just putting, I think, other language around it, but correct me, is kind of a consumer-oriented or a consumer cultural operating system that we’ve we’ve used as a church… Todd Wilson — Right. Rich Birch — …you know, obviously by definition, if you ah use a um consumption-based model, that doesn’t, leave you it’s very difficult to turn around and say, okay, now become a multiplier. You know, we got you here as a consumer. Okay, now how do we make you a multiplier? Is that the core pain? Todd Wilson — It is. And Rich, you’re painting the picture of why looking back to understand how we got here is important. If it’s true, that are ah If it’s true, and I want to suggest people ought to go look at it for themselves, that the underlying operating system that has evolved over the last 75 years, it’s not where it started with Donald McGavern in 1955. And there was never bad intentions by any of the good people through the 70 years. Rich Birch — Yeah, right. Todd Wilson — We have evolved from what was originally one thing. into a consumer model that is way more focused on success is growing big, success is making converts, not necessarily disciples. And we we can diagnose that if there’s a problem today, and I suggest there is a problem today, then how we got here and understanding how over 70 years, what was intended to be one thing, gradually (like the frog getting boiled in cold water) turned into something else. Todd Wilson — We’ve got to go through the the, if we really want to change the operating system, and I’ve seen how hard it is, guys can have the paradigm shift. We need to change. Then they go back home into the operating system that they’re operating in. And it is really, really hard to just throw off one operating system and embrace another one Todd Wilson — And I wouldn’t even encourage people to do that. Don’t go home and just change your operating system overnight. But if you do want to make thoughtful, progressive change, the best way to do it is to start by going back and learn the lesson of how did we get where we are? Rich Birch — Yeah. Todd Wilson — How did things get off track to where to where we are? Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. Todd Wilson — And that’s what ended you know, I started out the book really to go after understanding the operating system itself. And very quickly came to the conclusion, oh, we I’m not sure how we’re going to move to a new operating system if people don’t go through the hard work of looking back and understanding how well-intentioned people over time have delivered for us what we have today in a flawed system. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. You know, I know, again, from my own personal experience, not to bring this back to me, but to my own personal experience, again, it’s been interesting to see similar patterns. You know, every couple years, there’s like some new idea that comes up in the church. And oftentimes I’m like, yeah, this is just like of rehash of a thing I saw 10 years ago or 15 years ago or 20 years ago. Rich Birch — It’s like, oh, this is is brand new. It’s like, ah, it’s echoes of things we’ve seen in the past. So why don’t we just kind of give people a flyover or a walkover of the kind of eras that you kind of define as you went through the book, just to give people a high level. Rich Birch — Ultimately friends, you know, I’m encouraging you to to do two things out of today. One is to pick up, I think this could be a great book for you and your team to go through. You and your leadership team, buy copies of this, read it. I think it could be an interesting book for you or, and go and listen to Todd’s interview with Carey as well. Carey just takes longer in his podcast and has more time. So there’s going to be, there’s lots packed into that as well. Rich Birch — But why don’t you kind of give us a flyover of the eras? And then maybe when you think about each one of those, something that was like, really positive that came from that area something like hey there’s something good there or maybe there’s something there that we’ve got to be cautious about as we think about the future. Todd Wilson — Yeah. And just to be clear, Rich, you know this, ah I’m a local church guy. My calling is a local church. I’m still on staff at a local church. I love the local church. So this part of the, difficulty for me in spending two years and over a hundred hours of interviews and putting this timeline of history together is I love the church. Todd Wilson — And I I, don’t know that I’d be sitting here talking to you if it weren’t for several of these eras I’m getting ready to name to you. So you’ve got really, I think a common thread through across these areas as we jump into them is typically apostolic, evangelistically driven leaders who really want to reach people. Hell is real. Lost people are going there. We got to reach them. And I think that’s the driving factor across all these eras is well-intentioned people… Todd Wilson — And if I can start with the end point, I think we’ve sort of co-opted the more holistic disciple-making growth engine that’s capable of generational disciple-making with strategies for institutional programmatic growth that are not capable of reproduction. They’re very good at growing large things and reaching lots of people, but not necessarily making, you know, through relational disciple making, disciples who make disciples who plant churches that plant churches. Todd Wilson — So here’s how I would do the flyover. When I got started writing this history, I thought I was doing one chapter of this history in another book. Rich Birch — I love it. Todd Wilson — And one chapter turned into two chapters and three chapters. And eventually my editor said, Todd, you just need to do a full book. Rich Birch — Well, that’s a book. Todd Wilson — And it ends up turning into the longest book I’ve written because of the 75 year history. And ah Rich, seriously, don’t, people don’t need to feel bad if they don’t know all the history. I, I’m like a where’s Waldo through a lot of this history. I’ve had a seat at the table for a lot of the stuff through these eras. Todd Wilson — Until writing this book, I did not know how all the dots connected across these eras. And then it became there were so many, oh, oh, oh. So here’s here’s the shot I’ll give to you. Ididn’t really I knew I had heard of Donald McGavern. I knew he was considered the father of the modern church growth movement. I’ve never, prior to writing this book, read about him, gone off and studied him. Gary McIntosh is his by is Donald McGavern’s biographer. So I spent a lot of time with Gary. He pointed me in the right directions. Todd Wilson — And here’s what I learned. Donald McGavern, born in the late 1800s, international missionary in India. um His father and mother were missionaries in India. He came from the mission field and his context was the international mission field. Todd Wilson — Now, get this as the starting point in 1955. He’s an international missionary. He has planted 15 churches himself in his career, none of which ever grew to more than 100 people. So you got to let that sink in. The father of the modern church growth movement planted 15 churches, none of which grew to more than 100. And yet he’s the father of what we consider now the modern church growth movement. Rich Birch — Right. Interesting. Todd Wilson — So the kind the context was, he became fascinated after reading a research report on why some churches in provinces in India were growing and others weren’t. Sometimes churches in the same village that were growing and just down the street, others weren’t. Todd Wilson — So he kind of took a scientific approach, the study of church growth. Like let’s study this like it’s a science, like what’s causing some churches to grow. And he he had very clear conclusions out of that, but you know, a handful of conclusions of what’s causing that. Todd Wilson — And so ultimately, when he came off the mission field by 1960, 61, he started the Church Growth Institute, not for U.S. pastors, but for international missionaries who were on furlough to come home and learn about church growth principles that they could take back to the international mission field. He had no interest in U.S. pastors. Todd Wilson — So for multiple years in the 60s, he was doing that. And when Fuller wanted to start their International School of World Missions, one of their best faculty member ratings was Donald McGavern. So they invited him to come become the founding dean of the the Fuller School of World Missions. Todd Wilson — But he only agreed to do it if he could bring the Church Growth Institute with him. So by 1970, you’ve got that up and running. He’s built his team. He invited a guy called C. Peter Wagner off the mission field to come be on his faculty staff. And in 1970, 71, Peter Wagner convinced Donald McGavern that they ought to run one class for U.S. pastors on church growth. Todd Wilson — And the rest is history. That one class, it just turned into, Imean, people were very interested in it. Denominations became interested. And literally within a couple of years, you’ve got this up and to the right people latching on to church growth science. Todd Wilson — And that starts the process, you know. Even from the beginning, you start to see a little bit of co-opting away from McGavern’s things. Not fast, but a little bit. Todd Wilson — So right on the heels of that, in the 70s then, you’ve got this young kid, ah Bill Hybels… Rich Birch — Right. Todd Wilson — …who’s running you know going to go into business and he’s running a street ministry with youth. He’s being mentored by Robert Shuler. Rich Birch — Yes. Todd Wilson — And Shuler’s got the possibility thinking, think outside the box, very apostolic. Turns out Shuler not only mentors Hybels, but there’s some mentoring of Rick Warren. And so you’ve got the birth of the seeker-sensitive era then. Todd Wilson — You know, if the first era was the McGavern-Roots era, now we’ve got the seeker-sensitive era. And, you know, that can be a positive or a negative stigma. For me, in 1976, I’m in middle school going into high school, not a Christian, live down the street from this movie theater called the Willow Creek Movie Theater. Rich Birch — Right. Right. Todd Wilson — And my mom drags us kicking and screaming into the Willow Creek Movie Theater. We were the avatar family for the Seeker Sensitive family movement. Rich Birch — Right. Movement. Todd Wilson — From Seeker Sensitive, you get out of that the what Peter Drucker and Bob Buford would call the large church phenomena and the birth of Leadership Network then with the large church phenomena, which became the megachurch phenomena. Todd Wilson — You’ve got Rick Warren and his masterful work with the purpose-driven church. Rick’s able to put handles on this church growth part, but Rick was a disciple of Donald McGavern, so he’s got the McGavern roots. Todd Wilson — You’ve got Hybels with the Shuler roots. And in that 80 into the 90s with the birth of the Global Leadership Summit and the other, you’ve you’ve got this very influential large church phenomena, purpose-driven, being shaped by, you know, in large part, the combination of Leadership Network, Hybels, Rick Warren… And that brings us up to you know about 2000. Todd Wilson — And just as a flyover, I would then call the era of the externally focused church. You’ve got the rapid fire birth of church planting networks. You’ve got multi-site. People don’t realize prior to 2000, there’s less than 50 multi-site churches. Rich Birch — Yeah. Todd Wilson — Leadership Network engages it in 2000. And from 2000 to 2010 you see an up, I mean, radically up and to the right. Rich Birch — Right. Todd Wilson — The externally focused church, same thing. Rick Russo has book right in that time period. The missional guys, right in that time period. So the common theme between these church planning networks, the missional guys, the externally focused guys, the multi-site, is we’re now looking outside of ourselves. Rich Birch — Right. Todd Wilson — But in large part, we’re still looking outside of ourselves as growth strategies for our things. If you really go look under the hood of a lot of those. Todd Wilson — And then I would say coming out of the externally or outwardly focused era, 2015 to 2025, I just have no other name than the disruption era. As I was doing the research on this book, um I had to stop at like 12 major disruptions that happened in that time period with COVID right in the middle. Rich Birch — Right. Todd Wilson — And so that’s the… Rich Birch — Political upheaval. There’s a bunch in there in that same, you know, yeah, that there’s been a schism. Todd Wilson — You’ve got deconstruction of faith. Rich Birch — Yep. Todd Wilson — You’ve got cynicism. You’ve got platformed individualism with the birth of social media. Now anybody can be their own, you know, playlist influencer. There’s just so many disruptive factors in there. Rich Birch — Right. Todd Wilson — Now you look at all those disruptive factors with the evolution of what’s happening in the church and the church operating system. And it leaves us on a very shaky foundation at that point that, you know It kind of brings us up to where we are now, and you can either be a pessimist at that or an optimist. And I choose the optimist path that we’re poised for a new day and a new operating system is my prayer. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s amazing. And friends, as you can see, you just got a real thin slice of, you know, just all the various phases that you do such a great job unpacking for us to help us really understand how we we got here. It was It was wild, it’s wild thinking about a lot of that because I remember, you know, various phases of those over the last particularly 25 years, you know, seeing that up close and seeing, you know, kind of the impact that has had and then wondering about the future and where we go from here. Rich Birch — So thinking about the future and, you know, obviously you’ve, um you know, you’ve you’re making a clear clarion call around, hey, we’ve got to think differently than the consumer driven operating system. We’ve got to we’ve got to come up with something different. After all of that, um and we’ve kind of covered this already, but I’d love to make sure we kind of hone on this, have this resonate with people that are listening in. Why is it so difficult for that system, for the consumer-driven operating system to to really ultimately produce healthy reproduction and multiplication and in churches? What’s structurally ah broken about it? And what what would be some first steps we should be thinking about change to the future as we think about, okay, where we go from here? Todd Wilson — Yeah. Rich Birch — How do we, you know, build on the positive stuff, but also look for something different as we look to the future? Todd Wilson — Yeah. I think we don’t have to make it complex, Rich, if we just keep trying to come back to simplicity for a minute. Like the system that has evolved has actually become pretty complex when you think about it. I would say if we could just focus on, I’m not even going to say changing overnight, but if if I’m a lead pastor, if I’m on staff at a church, I’m really focused on disciple-making as the core mission and growth engine of the church. Rich Birch — Right. Todd Wilson — Like what is it, most churches are going to say our mission is disciple making or it’s going to be part of it. They’re going to say we have a culture of disciple making, but it is not what the data shows. Rich Birch — Right. Todd Wilson — You know, again, 95% of churches do not have a culture of disciple-making. They have a culture of program activity. Rich Birch — Right. Todd Wilson — And so I’m not an advocate of changing everything overnight, but if you want to shift from a culture of program activity to a true culture of disciple-making‚ it has to start with the lead minister having a simple, reproducible, in-practice disciple-making approach that is being modeled for the… I don’t mean discipling the staff. I mean there’s people the lead pastor are personally discipling, modeling that simple, reproducible process. Todd Wilson — Where we’re starting to see traction and where I think the breakthroughs are going to come in getting us to the new operating system of the future, it is going to start, and it’s it’s happening right now, with pastors who say, you know, if I’m really honest, I’ve been preaching the last 52 weeks. I’ve been leading meetings. I’ve been doing, I’ve been doing, I’ve done, but I’m not really personally making disciples. Rich Birch — Right. Todd Wilson — And I think it’s going to start with the lead pastor, the elders, senior people saying, If we could only have one metric of success in the next 12 months, it’s not growth, it’s not the activities we do, it’s not the new building. If we only have one measure of success, it’s how many disciples have I personally, relationally been involved in? me Not how many have I preached to, not how many outreach events have we done where we’ve got, but what have I personally done on the disciple-making front? Todd Wilson — And I don’t want to make it more complicated than that. That’s what we’re missing right now. Rich Birch — That’s good. No, that’s really good. Yeah, that’s good. I love the practical takeaway of, um yeah, it’s like, who are the three people in your life that you’re actually discipling? Let’s start there. Rich Birch — So this is kind of a sidebar to it. Todd Wilson — Can I just look real quick? Rich Birch — Yes. Yep. Push back. Yep. Todd Wilson — So David Putman, who’s part of what we do at Multipliers, David’s longtime kingdom guy. Rich Birch — Yep. Todd Wilson — You should have him on as an interview here. David is completely focused on what he calls the 5-3-2 right now. Five simple reproducible principles, three rhythms, and and two relationships. So it’s a triad of three people that just keeps reproducing. Todd Wilson — Anybody can do it. A ninth grader can do it. A lead pastor can do it. I’m watching this model take different groups by storm right now. And whether you embrace the 5-3-2 or some other model like it, the key is going to be having a simple, reproducible process that works for the lead pastor and anyone else in the church. Same model. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. Yeah we had David on back in 2020 and I’m like we got to get him back on uh the podcast. Rich Birch — So sidebar issue, so this is not something we’d you know kicked around ahead of time but it’s kind of adjacent to this. So I am not a I’m not a teaching pastor. Similar to you. I’m not, i never saw myself as a lead pastor. I’ve always been in the like, Hey, my job’s to be in the second chair, cheering for other lead pastors. I’ve worked for um really over my career as an XP three incredible communicator lead pastors who it would appear like, and it is, they, all three of them, God gifted them with this ability to speak and gather crowds. Like that was like core. And, and I, I’ve spent a lot of time like listening to them and watching them. And part of it just appears to be like, it’s definitely a gifting that’s going on there. Rich Birch — And I, over time, ah questions like the following would come up that I would I’d struggle with, where it’s like, it would appear like this person can gather a lot of people, and we can build more chairs in front of that person and people will hear that person and they’ll they’ll take steps towards Jesus. Rich Birch — And I understand that that’s not, or that’s not a full picture of discipleship. That’s one piece of the discipleship puzzle, but it’s not… And the the kind of organizational pressure is, okay, let’s keep figuring out how to build more seats in front of this person and and their gift. How do we get them to leverage their gift well? Rich Birch — And to be honest, I’ve been in conversations where I’ve been the voice of like, I want to line 100,000 people up in front of this person to hear this person speak because I think the way they talk about Jesus is different than what I’ve heard other people say and it it’ll make a difference. Rich Birch — That is, I think, at the center of this tension that there’s some there seems to be something about the gift of teaching that it’s not, I don’t know whether it’s not evenly distributed, or there’s like a brokenness in humanity and we only want to listen to certain kinds of people. I don’t know whether it’s one of those two things. So all I’ve done is describe a problem and I’m going to say, comment on it, Todd. Todd Wilson — Yeah. I think you’re right on the mark. I think I want to affirm that, you know, I mean, everybody has their definitions. I believe the preaching role is, and and the teaching and reaching is a piece of the discipleship equation. Rich Birch — Yep. Todd Wilson — I think if I’m defining the problem statement, We have made it the biggest piece… Rich Birch — Sure. Todd Wilson — …instead of a piece or a playing a role in it. So I think the issue is that how big we’ve made it. Like you, I was an executive pastor for years. And when I look back on that time, my role was not about holistic relational disciple making that could be the growth engine of the church. and it It was how do we get as many people in seats in the auditorium on Sunday? We need great marketing. We need great outreach. Todd Wilson — And again, I think all of those play a role in the disciple-making process ultimately. But let’s just be honest, that’s not disciple-making itself. It plays a role in the disciple-making process. Rich Birch — Right. Todd Wilson — So the elephant in the room here is, how do we scale disciple-making? If I if I could be If I could be the czar of this, I’m not, but if I could be, I want the genius at the end. I want the unique gifts that are represented across the whole mosaic and the church, starting with that dynamic creature that can attract the crowd. I want it. Todd Wilson — But I also want those senior leaders of the organization I really want to be focused on what is our growth engine and what is our holistic disciple-making process. Rich Birch — Right. Todd Wilson — And the number one thing I want from those senior leaders is not their unique gift. I want their modeling, their personal modeling of the simple, reproducible, disciple-making growth engine that anybody in the church can do. Rich Birch — That’s good. Todd Wilson — I mean, that that preaching gift you’re talking about, that that one lead pastor can do, how many other people in the church can do that? Rich Birch — Right. Not many. Yep. Todd Wilson — So there’s their paradigm. So we need them doing it. Rich Birch — Yes. Todd Wilson — But I would argue what we need them doing even more than that inspiration is modeling the simple reproducible disciple making thing that people know that’s how we’re going to win here. Rich Birch — Yeah. Well, and I’ve that lines up, I’ve said it at probably, well, not a thousand times, but hundreds of times with lead pastors over the years that in the context of this conversation, I would rather them weave in the discussion about their discipleship relationships as like just a normative part of conversation rather than the, we’re doing six weeks on discipleship and how to become disciple making. I’m like, if you just pepper that stuff in week in, week out, it just is a normative part of the conversation that changes culture. Rich Birch — The kind of like, we’re going to make it a program. We’re going to brand it. We’ve got a great name on it. And my experience has been, it’s it’s a little bit like nailing jello to the wall. There’s there’s actually some of that containing of what we’re talking about actually kills the exact thing that we’re trying to do. And so, man, I think there’s a real tension there. And how do we help those people? Rich Birch — Because it’s not like we want them to do a worse job. It’s not like, hey, if you could stop talking in a way that attracts a crowd, that’s not the answer. But we’ve got to, like you say, how do we move them into those personal relationships? That’s fantastic. Rich Birch — Well, this has been a great conversation… Todd Wilson — My question would be, Rich, what what would happen… Rich Birch — Yep. Todd Wilson — …if an average lead pastor went on a one-year journey to to of disciple-making themselves? Call it a triad, call it four, five. They’re always, over the next year, going to be in a disciple-making small micro group… Rich Birch — Yep. Todd Wilson — …and all of their preaching is going to be informed. Rich Birch — Yep. Todd Wilson — That’s their laboratory of learning. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s their paradigm. Yeah, that’s good. Todd Wilson — That’s their paradigm. And now they’re bringing it to life, not just as periodic examples, but, you know, my whole frame of reference of my library is what comes out of that experience. Rich Birch — Yeah. Todd Wilson — And our problem right now is that’s just lack. It isn’t that it’s inserted a little bit. It’s just lacking. Rich Birch — Right. Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, this has been great. what ah What a great conversation. And as you can tell, friends, there’s a lot we could talk about there. And a lot you know just there’s a rich conversation that could be had around this. Rich Birch — Let’s let’s pivot and kind of talk a little bit about the book specifically. i want to make sure people pick up copies of this. Again, the name of it is How Did We Get Here? Looking Back to Look Forward. People can get this on Amazon. Are there other places that you would send people if they want to pick up copies of this? Todd Wilson — Yeah. So if they go to church-growth.org, church-growth.org, that’s the book’s homepage. You can actually get the free PDF there. You can get the free audio version there. There’s a full wiki there that people can contribute to. What you kind of mentioned it in passing, but I’ll highlight, it is impossible to read this book and not see yourself in it. Rich Birch — Yes. Yeah. Todd Wilson — Anyone who’s been a Christian for a while, they, the editor of the book said the power of this is going to be, she said, I can tell you the page in the book that I entered the story. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great. Todd Wilson — So you’ve got the free PDF, the free audio, the wiki, and then for people that just want the paper versions, you can get it on Amazon. Rich Birch — That’s great. And we’ll link to that friends so that you can, you know, find that quickly in the show notes and, and friends, I would encourage you again, to me, I think this could be a great resource to do with your leadership team, as I mentioned earlier. It would be a great kind of conversation starter and really context setter for us to think through these issues as we think about the future. Rich Birch — So kind of as we, as we come to close up today’s conversation, any final words as we wrap up today? Todd Wilson — Rich, I just appreciate the work you’re doing. I want to be an encouragement to pastors. Don’t let this book be, it’s not a deconstruction book. It’s not, oh my goodness, the church has fallen apart. Rich Birch — No, yeah. Todd Wilson — We need to keep plugging away doing what we’re doing, but we also have to have an eye on the future that this operating system that has evolved, everything has a beginning and an end. And this operating system, I believe, is in its final days. I think we’re we’re seeing you know less and less effectiveness with it. And I think we just need to be in a posture of giving permission to the next generations to do some trial and error and experimentation and not be locked into the paradigm of the of the past inheriting previous things. Rich Birch — No, fantastic, Todd. I appreciate you being here. And I would echo that, you know, you’re you’re the kind of leader that’s in our corner trying to help us get better. And so I appreciate the voice that you’ve had for for decades. And so I really appreciate that. Rich Birch — If people want to track with you, get connected, follow along with Multipliers where do we want to send them online? Todd Wilson — Multipliers.org can get me to all the different ways from email to phone to social media. So multipliers.org. Rich Birch — That’s great. Thanks so much, Todd. Appreciate you being here, sir. Todd Wilson — Thank you, Rich. Appreciate it.

   August 20, 2026·53min
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   Number 5: Why the Best Leaders on Your Team Are Often Running on Empty with Michelle Drake

   Welcome back to another episode of the unSeminary podcast. Today we’re joined by Michelle Drake, a Christian health coach, Pilates instructor, and host of the Health Habits for Christian Moms podcast. After overcoming years of eating disorders, perfectionism, and an unhealthy relationship with food and exercise, Michelle now helps Christian moms pursue health from a place of stewardship rather than striving. In this conversation, she offers a compassionate and practical perspective on creating healthier rhythms for women in ministry. The invisible weight moms carry. // Michelle explains that one of the greatest challenges for working moms is the constant “mental load” they carry. Beyond their ministry responsibilities, they’re managing family schedules, meals, appointments, school decisions, friendships, finances, household responsibilities, and countless unseen details. Many simultaneously wrestle with guilt, feeling they’re never doing enough at home or at work. While they often appear highly capable, many are quietly carrying an exhausting emotional burden that supervisors rarely see. When health becomes another burden. // Modern culture often frames health through pressure, perfection, and appearance. Instead of becoming a source of strength, health can become one more impossible standard moms feel they must achieve. Michelle describes how many women believe they must exercise perfectly, prepare flawless meals, and meet unrealistic expectations, or they shouldn’t bother trying at all. This “all-or-nothing” mindset creates shame rather than freedom and often pushes healthy habits further out of reach. Create a culture of rest. // One of the greatest gifts church leaders can offer their teams is permission to embrace rhythms of rest. Michelle points to Jesus’ invitation in Matthew 11:28–30, reminding leaders that rest isn’t a distraction from ministry. Rather, it is part of faithful ministry. Churches that consistently model healthy rhythms help staff understand that their worth isn’t tied to constant productivity. When leaders prioritize abiding in Christ over endless activity, they create healthier teams capable of sustaining long-term ministry. Recognize the warning signs. // Burnout rarely appears overnight. Michelle encourages leaders to watch for subtle changes in previously engaged team members: withdrawing from conversations, reduced enthusiasm, difficulty making decisions, unusual forgetfulness, or becoming overwhelmed by tasks they normally handled with ease. These outward behaviors often reflect burdens that have been accumulating beneath the surface for months. Rather than immediately trying to solve the problem, leaders should view these moments as invitations for compassionate conversation. Movement supports more than physical health. // As a Pilates instructor, Michelle sees firsthand how exercise isn’t simply about fitness—it helps people release accumulated stress, become present, and create space for clarity. Setting aside time for movement also communicates something important: “I matter too.” For busy moms who spend much of their lives caring for others, intentional physical activity becomes an act of stewardship rather than selfishness, allowing them to show up with greater energy for their families and ministries. Start with listening, not fixing. // Michelle believes the most practical step leaders can take is surprisingly simple: have intentional conversations. Rather than assuming they know what someone needs, supervisors should ask questions like, “What’s taking the most energy from you in this season?” Then simply listen. Many moms don’t need immediate solutions as much as they need to feel seen, understood, and supported. Relational leadership builds trust long before organizational changes become necessary. Small habits create lasting change. // Through her Health Habits for Christian Moms podcast, Michelle encourages women to reject perfectionism and instead build simple, sustainable habits that fit their current season of life. Whether it’s preparing healthy meals in practical ways, fitting in ten-minute workouts, or reframing health through a biblical lens, the focus is always on consistency over intensity. To learn more about Michelle Drake visit michelledrake.co and listen to her Health Habits for Christian Moms podcast. Thank You for Tuning In! There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, but you chose unSeminary, and I’m grateful for that. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it by using the social media buttons you see at the left hand side of this page. Also, kindly consider taking the 60-seconds it takes to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, they’re extremely helpful when it comes to the ranking of the show and you can bet that I read every single one of them personally! Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: Intulse If you’re committed to the growth of your church, make sure your communication systems are set up so nobody feels left behind. When your church is smaller, that comes easy. You know people by name. A guest doesn’t get lost in the shuffle—someone follows up, every guest, every time. But growth can change that—unless your systems grow with you. Perhaps this church using Intulse says it best: “Intulse has revolutionized the way we communicate with people, giving us the ability to make a big church feel small because of that personal connection.” The Intulse app gives your team members a working church number, so anyone can call or text without ever handing out a personal number. Every conversation syncs straight into your ChMS, like Planning Center, so your whole staff stays on the same page—no matter who a person talks to. That’s how you keep every person feeling known, no matter how big your church gets. Want to know if your communication systems are ready for growth? Download Intulse’s free guide, “10 Communication Blind Spots That Hinder Church Growth,” at Intulse.com/unseminary. And if any of those blind spots hit home for you, schedule a call with one of their church communication specialists to learn how Intulse can help. Episode Transcript Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. Listen, if you’re an executive pastor, senior leader, person that’s like over leading people in your church, you’re going to want to tune into today’s episode. You’re going to want to stay connected all the way to the end because I suspect that today’s thing that we’re talking about, you’ve either reflected on and thought, hmm, that’s something that I’ve got to work on. We’ve got to think through as an organization. Or we’re going to name an issue today that I think you should work on and be thinking about. So whether you think it or you should just want to listen to me you should tune in and be a part of this conversation. Rich Birch — I’m excited to have a new friend of mine, Michelle Drake, on the on the phone on the phone. We’re not on phones, on the internet, on the not even on the internet, on the podcast. Michelle and I attend the same church, Connexus Church, and have a mutual friend and made the connection. And we got talking, got to know each other. And I said, hey, Michelle, I got to get you on the podcast. I want I want people to hear from you and learn from you. Rich Birch — So Michelle, why don’t we start with kind of tell us a little of your background. What do you do? Who are you? Tell us a little bit about yourself. Michelle Drake — So hi, I’m Michelle. I am a mom. I am a Pilates instructor. But most importantly, I am a daughter of the king. I am a Jesus lover, follower. And really, I think that why I’m landing here today is because I spent a lot of my life feeling like I was never enough. I was a perfectionist really early on. I was always trying to prove my worth. And, you know throughout my teenage years, I really used food and exercise as a way to cope and gain control over my life. And that quickly spiraled into multiple eating disorders and that I battled. And I was in and out of the hospital throughout my whole teenage life, basically. Rich Birch — Wow. Michelle Drake — So yeah, so it was really chaos. So that’s kind of the foundation of like ah the where I have where I am at now. Rich Birch — Yep. Michelle Drake — You know, so even like I went to university when I went to university, I was like trying to go to the furthest university way to run away from my problems, but of course they followed me there. Rich Birch — Right. Michelle Drake — And instead of things getting better, unfortunately, they spiraled more, more extreme. I kind of swung to the opposite extreme. So where I once was like overly controlled with like food and exercise, I lost control completely. And so, you know, where I had once been like super underweight and ended up the hospital with severe eating disorders, I was like now gaining a ton of weight. Like I wasn’t moving, I wasn’t going to class. It was just super chaotic. Rich Birch — Wow. Michelle Drake — So eventually I started to you know do some inner work and found some spiritual practices. And I even back back in the day, like in my mid-20s, I started a coaching practice because I had found some freedom, a little bit of freedom in like my food and exercise journey. But I was still very much in my own process. And I also didn’t know Jesus at the time. Michelle Drake — But then im met Jesus And everything changed. And, um you know, within six months, six months, I was married. And then two years later, I had my first daughter, Daisy. And it was really becoming a mom that really brought everything into focus in a new way for my health in particular. Michelle Drake — So I chose to have an unmedicated home birth. And I had this very like ideal, ideal picture. Rich Birch — Right. Michelle Drake — Idealized, I guess, kind of vision of like what I wanted it to be. So I really wanted to be like peaceful with worship music and, the sense of like calm and control. And of course, like it was absolutely nothing like that. It was beautiful, but I realized like I actually wasn’t in control of anything. And it was really intense and it was super primal and it was just far beyond anything that I was prepared for. Michelle Drake — And but that was a really beautiful moment for me because somewhere like in within that process, I hit this point of like surrender. Like, okay, I can’t actually do anything here. I just have to like let go and let my body do this work. And so, yeah, I I realized that there was really nothing I could do to control what was happening. I just had to trust my body. Michelle Drake — And it really struck me that this was my body doing something that I could not will my way through, but that it was really designed for. And, you know, it carried me through something that I could not do on my own. Michelle Drake — And so that that experience, it shifted something in me. It made me realize, and this is a piece that I was missing, is that my body isn’t something to control or to punish, but really it’s something that God designed as a vessel. And it’s really how we become, you know, his hands and feet in the world. Michelle Drake — And so, you know, after that point, I became like after birth and realizing like, okay, my body is designed as a vessel. Like it’s it’s actually God’s. So at that point, I became I began to bring more like intentionality into the way that I cared for my body. Rich Birch — That’s cool. Michelle Drake — And not from a place of obsession, but a place of stewardship. Yeah. Rich Birch — That’s pretty cool. Michelle Drake — Yeah. And so, you know, the result of that is feeling like the best that I’ve ever felt, more confident in the way that I take care of myself. And and actually that allows me to become more outward focused because, you know, my habits are sustaining my health in a way that supports how I can show up for my family. Michelle Drake — And so, yeah, I just feel like, you know, I I feel the sense of God inviting me into something that I can like share my story to help other moms, you know, step into that same place of stewardship, like free from that shame or guilt. Rich Birch — So good. Michelle Drake — So yeah, that’s kind of, a sorry, that’s like a lot. Rich Birch — No, no, it’s wonderful. Don’t apologize. That’s fantastic. I think that’s that’s great. Like the thing, um friends that listening in, obviously we talk to church leaders every week and trying to provide help. And, you know, I’m honored that you would take some time to be with us today for a couple of reasons. Rich Birch — First of all, um you know when a allow we have a lot of executive pastors listening. And if I was to go and speak at a conference of executive pastors, maybe there’s 500 leaders in the room and 15 of them would be women. And they’re, unfortunately, in the minority. Rich Birch — And then when I think about there’s like a thing I’m going to name publicly that I don’t think I’ve ever said publicly in whatever, 800, over 800 episodes. Like there’s I know on the staff teams that I’ve led that when I think about the people that I led, it was the moms that are like amazing leaders. They’re just incredible, like doing so much. And it’s like a secret hack. Find them a mom and they’ll get stuff done because they they have to. Michelle Drake — Yes. Yes. Rich Birch — And so today, I’m honored that you would help us kind of think help us think more critically on behalf of the moms on our teams and to think through you know, what we, you know, some, maybe some ways we should be leading. That’s the kind of conversation that we’re going to have here, friends that are listening in. Michelle Drake — Yes. Totally. Rich Birch — So when you think of the, you know, Christian moms… Michelle Drake — Yeah. Rich Birch — …you know, assuming that they’re Christians who are working for us on our teams as staff at church, which that should be the case. Michelle Drake — Hopefully. Rich Birch — What are some pressures that these people are carrying around them that especially as they’re you know, as their leaders, employers, that we maybe don’t see, that isn’t isn’t clear, that maybe isn’t on the surface? Because I look at moms and I’m like, those people are superheroes. They’re getting tons done. But what are some of those pressures that they might not see? Michelle Drake — Yeah. I think that, you know, mental load is a huge thing for moms. You know, and depending on like what season of life that they’re actually in with their families and children, you know, they’re thinking about like scheduling appointments and like socializing their kids and, you know, how they even like want to educate their children. That’s a big conversation, like the Christian kind of sphere. Rich Birch — Yeah, 100%. Michelle Drake — And then, you know, also what’s for dinner and doing laundry and organizing their homes and making time for friends and, you know, getting the kids and all these different activities and like, everything else that doesn’t really to a huge degree include themselves. Michelle Drake — And, you know, oh ah then if we’re talking about women in ministry um and leaders on on ministry teams and they’re working outside the home. And then maybe that there’s this sense of guilt for like working outside the home and then, you know, not being home enough or not being at work enough or, you know, not contributing enough in the household or not contributing enough at work. Rich Birch — Right. Michelle Drake — And so like there’s there’s this tension of like, I feel like there’s this tension of moms um of like they’re doing so much and at the same time feeling like they’re still not doing enough. And so, you know, yeah, I just think like, and then and then also in the in this sphere of health, as it kind of falls to the back burner because they have all this going on in their heads of like… Rich Birch — Other things happening. Yeah. Michelle Drake — …all of these things is like, okay, well, and then there’s also this thing of like exercise and like eating healthy and how do I feed my kids healthy and how do I eat healthy and how do I feel good and exercise and look this certain way and, you know, it just a lot. Rich Birch — Yeah, 100%. Michelle Drake — So these are some of the mental things that moms are carrying. Rich Birch — Yeah, just a few of the things that are that are bubbling around. Michelle Drake — Just a few of the things. Yeah. Yeah. Rich Birch — You know, it feels it feels like as a guy watching messaging that is pointed at moms particularly, women generally, but moms particularly, there’s like so much on the health front that… Michelle Drake — Yes. Rich Birch — …that runs pressure, you know, guilt, perfection. Michelle Drake — Totally. Rich Birch — It’s like tapping and and a negative emotion. Help us understand what does that do to someone over time? How does that, how does that impact the people on our teams? Michelle Drake — Well, yes, I think that and definitely the culture, there’s like a lot of cultural messaging around health. For moms that’s rooted in like pressure and guilt and perfection. And over time, you know, instead of like health being a thing that is like supporting your life, it actually becomes something that like drains you. And I know because that’s like, you know, the exact kind of messaging that pulled me into the extremes and the extreme patterns in my own life. Michelle Drake — And so, so much of what the world offers is really centered on either like aesthetics, like how you look or and this like hyper vigilant pursuit of like doing it perfectly. And, um you know, I think a both of those things carry a lot of shame and that’s really the world’s framework for health is like, you’re not doing enough and you’re not where you need to be, you know? Michelle Drake — But again, like we just spoke about, like moms are already carrying so much and there’s, you know, not enough time or energy or mental space or even like finances, because that’s a huge thing now, like spending as much money as you can on your health and on the best foods to do health in the way that culture says that you’re supposed to do it. Michelle Drake — You know, whether that’s like the hour long workouts or perfect, perfect meals and, you know, um buying all organic even and, you know, doing all the right things. Michelle Drake — So the message underneath all that is like, if you’re not doing it all, you’re not doing enough. So, you know, I think a lot of moms believe that health is only really worth pursuing if it’s, you know, looking a certain way and doing a certain way. And if they can’t do it that way, then often, you know, they’re not doing it at all. It’s just far too overwhelming to even start. Michelle Drake — Yeah. So, you know, I think that then the shame cycle kind of kicks in where like, you know they’re feeling behind. They’re feeling guilty about their bodies and about their habits and about not being more disciplined and because they can’t like live up to this cultural standard. And that creates this like inward spiral that actually pulls them away the presence with their families, the presence in their workplace, you know, that’s that really is what health should support. Michelle Drake — So the thing that’s really supposed to become this like supportive mechanism for the rest of their life… Rich Birch — Right. Michelle Drake — …becomes another source of burden. Rich Birch — So as a supervisor, like I want to create a culture where my team can thrive, where people have, you know, it’s it’s a great experience. And, you know, we’re obviously talking about moms specifically today. Like often without realizing it, I can imagine a world where work can become a negative force in that cycle that we’re talking about there. That actually just being a part of the kind of the pressure of that environment. Rich Birch — And I don’t want that to happen. I want it to be a positive force. I want to create a kind of culture where like, where, you know, pro moms, moms can have a great experience. It’s a great, you know, it’s a great experience for them. Michelle Drake — Yeah. Rich Birch — What does that look like? How, what, what would be, how could you coach us, you know, to, to try to make this a kind of environment that particularly for moms could be, and even maybe particularly around these health issues, how do we make it a more positive environment for them? Michelle Drake — So I guess the question, yeah like how do you support these moms and how do you create environments that supports these moms? Rich Birch — Sure. Michelle Drake — And, um you know, I think that the best place for leaders is not like about like jumping in and saving the day or something like that. Rich Birch — Right. Michelle Drake — Or like start like changing whole environments. But I think just like relational. I think that’s the first thing is just like understanding the weight that moms are carrying. Michelle Drake — And because like, again, like moms in ministry are wearing those multiple hats are not only like the leaders and the employees, but they’re also wife and mom and homemaker, and they’re constantly shifting between them. So, you know, that’s a really heavy mental load, like we discussed. And yeah, so when you’re carrying that much, it’s really easy to kind of start believing that your value is tied to, you know, your productivity or how well you’re like, holding it all together. Michelle Drake — And so, you know, like I know that because I’ve also lived that. And and there’s a season where I felt weighed down by so many, all these different responsibilities and felt like it all came down on me. And then if I dropped the ball, like everything would fall apart. Michelle Drake — But I think the reframe here is like looking to what Jesus offers. And that is, you know, in Matthew 11, where he says, come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I’m gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls. And so I think like, I think that really creating a culture of rest and a culture and a rhythm of rest within these workplaces, within these ministry pursuits is like that rest isn’t like rest is encouraged and is part of, is part of the kingdom work and it’s not taking away from the kingdom work, but it’s actually how, you know, we are able to be filled and overflow into, you know, everything else that we’re supposed to do. Michelle Drake — So I think like, I think that if leaders can really establish that rhythm for moms, because again, that’s not only going to benefit moms who already have so much, you know, to carry, but everybody else on the ministry team really is that, is that like rest is part of this. And that is, you know, abiding in Christ. Like when we can do that, like our priorities begin to shift. We begin to like lay down some of those heavy burdens and just making that, you know, really central to the mission is, yeah. Rich Birch — That’s good. Michelle Drake — Yeah. I think that’s, I think that’s really one of the greatest gifts that leaders can give to the moms and their team. Rich Birch — Yeah. Rest in the midst of it. Yeah. Michelle Drake — Yeah. Just a culture that consistently points them back to Jesus. Rich Birch — Yeah. Michelle Drake — Yeah. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. If if there was a mom on our my team who was running on empty, I feel like it’d be easy for me to miss the signals, that there would be like signals that are sent that and it could be… Listen, I like feel like I’m fairly in touch, but like maybe I’m just an idiot guy and I just don’t see it. Rich Birch — What are you know those early warning signs that like, hey, maybe there’s something here that’s not going correctly that that, and and it might not be that like, hey, I’m like you say, it’s not my job to necessarily jump in and, you know, fix it. But it’s but, you know, we want to provide a a culture that can support women in the midst of that. So what would be some of those early signs that kind of we should pay attention to before it becomes a crisis? Michelle Drake — Yeah, I think, so if there’s a woman who’s like, yeah, generally like quite engaged and then all of a sudden they’re starting to become a little bit more withdrawn or, you know, like a little bit less, whether it’s talkative or energetic or whatever within those settings, I think that’s a really good sign. um you know, and then also to like showing up physically, but and maybe not like emotionally invested into the mission. Maybe it’s taking longer to make decisions or, or, you know, decision-making becomes harder. Michelle Drake — I think also to forgetfulness, like forgetting things. So if you notice like a mom, Oh, like I asked her to things. She’s not do, she didn’t do it. Like, and usually she does or ah overwhelmed by, you know, seemingly menial tasks. Rich Birch — Right. Michelle Drake — I think that’s things that she would normally handle. Well, I think that’s a good sign that maybe she’s carrying a little bit too much. Yeah. And, and, you know burnout, it doesn’t happen overnight. And I think that a lot of ah a lot of these signs are actually just like finally the physical manifestation of something that she’s been carrying for a while. Rich Birch — Right. Been bubbling. Michelle Drake — Yeah, so… Rich Birch — Talk to us, at you know, from your perspective as a person who spends their days, like you said, you’re a Pilates instructor, you spend a large portion of your day helping people be active and stay active and do that in a healthy way, in a way that’s not, like you say, focused on the kind of negative reasons for that. Rich Birch — Talk to us about the connection between being active, and this would really be for anyone, moms included, being active and dealing with stress, the stuff that’s going on in life. How are those two connected to each other? Michelle Drake — Yeah, I think that they’re hugely, hugely connected. Because being active is like taking the time to be active and setting apart that time is, you know, is not only like you’re getting the physical benefits and and and the actual neurochemical benefits of that and of that activity. And but you’re also saying to yourself, like I deserve this time too. Michelle Drake — Like I’m pouring constantly out into everyone else, into my ministry, into my family. And so setting apart this time for me is doing something good for myself. But that, that has like these reverberation effects on everything else that I do. Michelle Drake — And so, um, yeah, I think that, sorry, I forget what the question was. Rich Birch — No, it’s just what’s the connection between you know being active and dealing with stress? Michelle Drake — Yeah. Rich Birch — How do those two work together from your perspective as someone who helps people stay active? Michelle Drake — Yeah. Yeah, I think also too, like just the the physical, like being physically active, there’s something like there’s like the psychosomatic thing where you can like be active and, and, and like get your heart rate pumping and sweat. And it’s like releasing something. Michelle Drake — I don’t know what it is. Rich Birch — Right. Michelle Drake — But like, often too, we’re carrying stress in our body and and we can feel it in our body and we’re tense and stuff. So then when you’re able to, and I teach like hot Pilates, so you’re sweating a lot… Rich Birch — Right. Michelle Drake — …and you’re just like releasing all this. And, you know, and you see people get like so intense, like in the burpees and, and they’re just getting really into it. And, and you know, a line I often use is just like in those burpee moments, in those moments where it’s like really, really intense. I’m just like, I’m just saying like, let everything go that you do not need to carry anymore. Like let it go. Michelle Drake — And I don’t know what it is about that, but yeah, something does release when we are moving physically and it just creates this like space of clarity. And I think also to like presence, like you’re so present when you are moving your body in like maybe an intense way, maybe a less intense way, but when you are like intentionally moving your body does require a sense of presence. And when you’re present, like, i don’t know, stress doesn’t really exist in the present. Rich Birch — Right. Yeah, yeah. Right. Michelle Drake — So I think it’s really beneficial in that way for sure. Rich Birch — So true. Yeah. During COVID, I was one of those people that bought a Peloton and, and I’m over a thousand rides in love it. Michelle Drake — Amazing. Rich Birch — It’s like, it’s incredible. And I would say, it has changed my, my view on all of this. Michelle Drake — Totally. Rich Birch — Like I used to, I used to go to the gym and all that. And it was, but it was like a, I did it because it was like, I got to check the box. I got to do this. I know this is an important thing. Michelle Drake — Yes. Yes. Rich Birch — But I look forward to those experiences and the days I don’t do that, I can feel it. I’m not as sharp. Michelle Drake — Yep. Rich Birch — And, you know, and I don’t deal with stress as well. Michelle Drake — Totally. Rich Birch — And I’ve even joked with other friends. It’s like, don’t get me started talking about Peloton. You know, I’ve talked with other friends. I’m like, there’s something about, obviously they’ve, obviously spent a lot of time listening to their and instructors and it’s always positive. It’s always, you know, there’s, they’re, they’re not like, um, even though you’re working hard, there’s no, it’s never a negative. It’s always, you know, they’re always using positive reinforcement. Rich Birch — And I’ve, I’ve joked with friends. I’ve said, listen, even just having 30 minutes in a day of someone telling me like, you can do this, like you, you got this, you know, is… Michelle Drake — Totally. Rich Birch — …cause there’s a lot of things in life where we don’t have that, you know, i don’t have that kind of… Michelle Drake — Totally. Rich Birch — …you know, reinforcement, which has been, it’s been transformative for me for sure. Michelle Drake — Yeah, and I think in those moments too when you’re like working really hard like and you’re sweating and it’s in it you’re like, oh, man, I don’t know if I could go anymore. And you have that story playing in your head of like, I can’t do it. Michelle Drake — But then somebody says, you can do it. Rich Birch — Yeah. Michelle Drake — You’re like, okay, you’re you’re instantly being reframed. Rich Birch — Yes. Michelle Drake — Like, okay, in my head I said I can’t, but then this person is saying I can. So there’s like, yeah, that that instantaneous like kind of moment of like, oh, no, yeah, I am doing it actually. Yeah. Rich Birch — Yeah, absolutely. Well, and it was, I’m the slow learner. I was hundreds, maybe four or 500 rides in before I realized this is actually mostly a mental thing than it is a physical thing. Michelle Drake — Totally. Rich Birch — Like I’m, it’s mostly between my, my ears where I’m like… Michelle Drake — Yes. Rich Birch — …you know, my body can keep going, but it’s in my head. I’m like, oh, OK, I’m done. I’m done. I just don’t want to keep going. And I never quit a ride, but you can you know, you can bail on a ride before you know you actually stop turning. And so, yeah, that’s interesting. That’s been an interesting journey for me, for sure, in a in a great way. And it and it for sure has helped me be better at what I do to be more show, you know, show up more in the rest of my life, for sure. Michelle Drake — Yeah, that’s beautiful. Rich Birch — So you actually built a podcast around this, which I think is exciting. Michelle Drake — Yeah. Rich Birch — And I’d love to hear us a little bit more about this. It’s called it’s called Health Habits for Christian Moms. Michelle Drake — Yeah. Rich Birch — We’ll put a link to it in the show notes, but tell us about the podcast. How you know how is it helping? What’s your heart behind it? I know as a podcaster, it’s a lot of work to pull the podcast together. So talk to me about the podcast. Michelle Drake — Yeah. So, ah you know, Health Habits for Christian Moms is is really something that I felt drawn and into or invited into by the Lord, you know, after like what I told you with my story and everything like that. But it really exists because, you know, I see that this pattern from moms of like moms who like love God and love their families and want to take care of their health, but, you know, feel exhausted and overwhelmed and stuck in this all or nothing mentality. And so, you know, this podcast is for moms who like know that their health matters, but struggle to make it a priority in the middle of like all of those things that we talked about, all of the real life things. Rich Birch — Yes, yes. Michelle Drake — You know, she’s busy. She’s carrying a lot of responsibility. And then and then I think a big thing is that she feels guilty taking that time away from herself, like away from every all the other responsibilities to put into her health, into herself. Michelle Drake — So like instead of adding more pressure, like how the world would with with health, I am, my aim is to help this mom build simple, sustainable habits, you know, that fit into the season of life that she’s actually in, and honor all the responsibilities that she already has. Michelle Drake — And I also really try to frame it in a biblical lens. So it’s not about like chasing a gut and like not about chasing perfection or, you know, not trying to earn worth through the way that we look or whatever it is. But but it’s about stewardship and caring and like really talking about like how do we care for the body God gave us. So that actually we can have more energy, more stamina, more capacity to serve the people that God has put in our life. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. I love it. Michelle Drake — Yeah Rich Birch — I would, give me a sense of what, you know, maybe a couple episodes, the kind of thing that you cover on the podcast. Michelle Drake — So it’s it’s honestly mostly super practical tips. Rich Birch — Yep. Michelle Drake — So it would be super practical tips like meal planning, like how to do that in a way that’s ah not overwhelming, um how to get dinner on the table in 10 minutes in a way that’s like still healthy food, um you know, habit formation, 10-minute workouts, like things that are super applicable and immediately applicable to her life. Michelle Drake — And then, but then also we’re talking about like these underlying issues and underlying struggles as well, whether it be like that guilt piece or the comparison piece, the people pleasing piece or believing, you know, that everyone’s, everyone else’s needs comes, comes first, comes above like her own needs. Rich Birch — Yep. Michelle Drake — And so, yeah, I think that’s that’s kind of how I I start with the practical. I lead with the practical. And then I’m sprinkling in that that encouragement of like reframing health into that biblical perspective. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. Yeah, that’s fantastic. You know, what struck me about this, even in this conversation is like, this could be a great thing to hand off if I’m an executive pastor or senior leader type person in the church. Like, this could be a great thing to pass off to your team and say like, hey, here’s here’s a resource for you, you know. You’re doing a great job. You’ve got lots of health habits, healthy habits, you know, person on our team, people on our team, but like this might help. And here’s a, you know, here’s a link to it. That could be a great way to pass it along ah to, you know, just help ah the folks even to just acknowledge, hey, I understand that here’s some things that you’re, you know, you’re thinking about. Rich Birch — So just as we’re kind of closing up today’s episode or thinking about, you know, bringing it down, you know, for a leader that’s listening in today who wants to do something this week to kind of take a first step to better support, particularly the moms on their team, what would you tell them? What advice would you give them that they could they could take a step this week to help support ah those and just incredible people on their teams? Michelle Drake — I think intentional connection and conversation. And, you know, I think asking the mom on your team, you know, what is taking the most energy from her in this season? I think moms really thrive on, on like that, that kind of connection piece and sharing burdens. Rich Birch — That’s good. Michelle Drake — And so I think, and and just listening to her and not trying to fix it, because I think that good leadership really starts with like, understanding your team in a relational way. So I would say that and and and trying to help kind of take off some of her burden simply just by listening, you know. And then um and then those other pieces of like creating cultures of of rest and and rhythms of rest is is really important. But something immediately applicable is just establishing like a relational, like truly caring conversation with with the mom on your team. Rich Birch — So good. Super helpful. Well, we’ll link to Health Habits for Christian Moms in the show notes. We want people to go over there and check it out. Is there anywhere else we want to send people online to connect with you, to kind of follow with your journey? Where do we want to send people? Michelle Drake — So definitely the podcast is the first the first place that I would send people. I am in the process of publishing my web website. So that will be published probably within the next week or so. I’m sure I would imagine that it’s going to take a while for this podcast to come out, but I don’t know what the timeline is. Rich Birch — Yeah. Michelle Drake — But but yeah, people will be able to find me at my website as well. Rich Birch — Great. What’s the address there? Michelle Drake — So the address is michelledrake.co. Rich Birch — Dot co. Great. Well, thanks, Michelle. I really appreciate being on today. So fun to connect over the internets for the podcast and all the best at Health Habits for Christian Moms. It was fun getting to know you a little bit more better today. Thanks so much. Michelle Drake — Thanks, Rich.

   August 13, 2026·32min
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