[00:00:00] Hey, Reclaim Leader community.
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[00:00:05] February 27th through 29th called Ministry Momentum.
[00:00:10] Get forward movement on one ministry idea.
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[00:01:28] Hey everyone, welcome to episode 326 of the Reclaim Leader. I'm Jason Tucker, back again with Jesse Skippington.
[00:01:31] How's it going, Jesse?
[00:01:32] Great, Jason.
[00:01:33] Glad to be talking shop with you.
[00:01:36] I'm excited for our guest today.
[00:01:37] So much fun to have Carl on with us again.
[00:01:41] Talking life and leadership in the local church and change is almost exactly the same as we've been talking about. Right. And he talks about it for small churches. It just shows like the process, it doesn't matter what size church you are. But I, you know, I went to a just a small sort of breakout conference recently and overheard
[00:03:01] somebody just basically saying, yeah, you know, these large church pastors, they
[00:03:04] don't, they don't really know what to hear from Carl. And of course, this is one that you handled on your own because in my church context, we were dealing with real life ministry on the ground and a kind of a crisis that popped up and that's life in the church, right? It's funny. It's only happened a couple of times with both of us, but we'll end up having to do
[00:04:22] an episode on our own. And then we check in at the end like you'll came in.
[00:04:25] Yeah, that's right. Yeah. When Jason on Faith and Ministry, episodes feature in-depth interviews about the topics that concerned pastors, especially those who minister in a small church context. And he is the author of four books. We know that ones on the way, maybe he'll tease that for us a little bit today. But welcome back to the podcast, Carl Vaders.
[00:05:40] It is good to be with you again.
[00:05:42] Not everybody knows this, but some of us who listen to the
[00:05:45] year end review episode of our podcast know that you had the on a series that we did on rest in episodes 270, 271. I'm just curious over the last year, do you think that's where we still are or has the number one shifted? Is it more about kind of getting into action or is it still rest? I was just curious if you've seen a change. I think maybe it's shifted from rest to recovery. I don't think that it's
[00:08:09] I think with what I'm seeing with small church pastors too is there's a lot of kind of predetermined defeat, right?
[00:08:11] It's the sense, well, what was Ed Stetzer's last quote, I just saw 175,000 churches under
[00:08:17] 100 people in attendance or 70% of churches worshiping under 100.
[00:08:23] So this is just how it is.
[00:08:24] It's a foregone conclusion.
[00:08:27] This is how it's going to go. all of them only badly. So I think people have now come to the point where, yeah, what you're saying is really that we're like, we're gonna keep doing this, but now we're really feeling burnt out and discouraged by it. But this is what church is. So I guess this is what we keep doing. And so one of my big emphases in addition to the whole idea of pastoral restroom recovery is simplification.
[00:09:44] And the smaller the church is,
[00:09:46] the more things need to walk through. And as you and I know, in revitalization,
[00:11:02] probably most things in life, it's about the process.
[00:11:05] I mean, what are athletes say, trust the process, right?
[00:11:07] Because you're not seeing all the results What's the difference? Why the focus on healthy church? And then what is the expectation or what's the right posture for pastors looking to lead change and to help their church get some life and some energy? The reason I concentrate on healthy church is because for so many years I tried to build
[00:12:20] a big church and it burned me out nearly, nearly killed me and nearly killed the healthy church
[00:12:25] that I was pastoring.
[00:12:26] And then when I started realizing, okay, I'm going to, we're just going to be asked to cheat on the health in order to get to the big. But if you're fully concentrating on healthy, you'll stay with the healthy. And for pastors, this relieves a whole bunch of burden. It did for me. When I made the shift from trying to get a church bigger, to simply knowing this is where God has called me,
[00:13:42] we are going to be the healthiest and most effective church that we can,
[00:13:46] given the resources that called that that was started by Donald McAvrin in the 1970s,
[00:16:02] And in the book, I go through all of the, what is it about American history
[00:16:05] that we like the bigger and the newer?
[00:16:07] And it comes from some,
[00:16:09] it's the unintended negative consequence
[00:16:13] of some very, very good things about being American.
[00:16:16] I'll just leave it at that for now.
[00:16:18] Yeah.
[00:16:18] Yeah.
[00:16:19] Well, also, so I often ask myself the question,
[00:16:22] why do I care about the trajectory
[00:16:26] of the Sunday attendance number? listing all the bad things about big churches. So therefore, we're not gonna try to go out and to grow. We have our people, we're gonna do our thing. I feel like there's kind of an unhealthy side of that that happens as well in reaction to. Far too many churches out there that are settling for where they are at varying sizes.
[00:17:43] But yeah, there's never any sense in the ministry
[00:17:47] that I do of case at all. Today, you can have a laptop, computer, or a smartphone and not have anybody in the room and still reach tons of people in all kinds of different ways who might then end up attending other churches. Eventually, they should all be in a physical church at some point. I don't believe you can fully function as a healthy, getting discipled Christian without
[00:19:00] physically meeting with God's people if you're able follow. I feel like it's super effective. So tell us a little bit about the resource,
[00:20:20] and then maybe you can walk us through a couple of the steps.
[00:21:24] examples, but most of what I read, most of what I was taught, most of the conferences I went to were taught from a big church standpoint. And I kept trying stuff that just didn't work in my place.
[00:21:30] It just, it couldn't be adapted over to my size to the point where I thought either
[00:21:35] either they're wrong or I'm stupid. It turned out the big church pastors weren't wrong. It works
[00:21:41] in their context. And I wasn't stupid. It didn't work in my context. And part of the reason I can say it's universal is because not only did it work in our church, but now that I've been speaking to small churches and speaking at conferences all around the country and around the world for the last of 11 years, I've now crowd tested these all over the place. And I know that these are universal biblical principles that will work in
[00:23:02] any size church. It's not just for my church, it's not just for big churches, it's the right thing in there you don't know until you hear back months, maybe years later from someone and going, yeah, that really is nice. So it is nice to have that confirmation from you. Thank you. Yeah. And it is the revitalization formula. It's the same thing. If you ever watch restaurant impossible with Robert Irvine, you ever seen that show? He does the same process. He just does it in like 72 hours or something.
[00:24:22] And it's really dramatic and makes for good TV.
[00:24:24] But he does the same thing. of a hundred days, it's like 90 to 120 days. And so a hundred days is right in the middle of that window. And then how do we get ourselves ready to do this? And so, but the four steps that it walks through, the first one is to assess your situation, including step number one, check in with the church's owner. Like we don't begin with process, we don't begin with systems,
[00:25:40] we don't begin with some new trend that's going around.
[00:25:44] We begin looking at a negative three, for instance, and this is also fairly subjective, maybe in a hundred days you can get to negative two. In some dangerous churches,
[00:27:01] some really difficult churches
[00:27:03] where the problems have been so ingrained for so long, team will be. But in small churches of 50 or under, and a lot of them, the team can be everybody who's willing to help out. But one of the things to actually talk about is how to help itself select. Like, we're going to have this meeting about how we're going to turn the church around. Everybody is invited. And then everybody who shows up is on the team. And then, you know,
[00:28:20] a couple months down the road, when you're doing new stuff and somebody comes and complains,
[00:28:23] well, I'll come up not on the team. You can it may sound to some like I'm saying something bad about Beat churches and I'm not. We can talk
[00:29:43] good about one without talking bad about the other church leaders, that's really an important part of it.
[00:31:01] On the pastor end of things, here's's usually easier to see in a small church because of that. So you have greater relationships, you have a greater connection with the pastor and with each other, and you can see whether or not the church is in sync health-wise in a smaller church more easily than in a bigger one. Yeah, that's really good.
[00:32:20] And by the way, thank you for not calling it church narthex, calling it church lobby.
[00:32:25] I appreciate that. and that have affected us in ways that we don't really understand. So the first third of the book is about the history of the church growth movement. The middle of is, of it is why is Bigness so dangerous? One chapter that is about Christian celebrity, and I call it inevitable why Christian celebrity is inevitably going to be a danger to us.
[00:33:41] And why Bigness is so dangerous to us.
[00:33:44] I talk about, there's a full chapter
[00:33:46] on what the church weren't done with enough excellence. People who are walking away from the faith aren't upset that the bass player screwed up the bass line in that second worship song. People who are
[00:35:02] calling themselves terms like ex-vangelical and the wonderful resource you are for pastors of all size churches. And again, folks, listening to God about what you discern him saying about what sort of church you're supposed to be and how faithfulness is the
[00:36:24] metric that he cares about the most, having a good process, but making sure that process change for more for life for vitality and finding striking that balance. So just reassuring wherever we are It's it's okay. And probably there's more that we're hoping gets done too. Yeah, I loved the thing that really stuck with me since the interview was when he was talking about How we need to do everything we can to be as faithful as we can for right now and to be satisfied in the ministry God's given us
[00:38:41] his purpose. So yeah.
[00:38:49] Can I okay, I want to confess something because because you you said something that triggered me. So here we go. Oh, I hate the term tall. That's right. Isn't that horrible?
[00:38:52] Oh my gosh, I hate it.
[00:38:54] I think why did it trigger you Jason?
[00:38:56] Why? I don't know. I feel like I when I when I if I'm called that I'm like a villain or something.
[00:39:04] I don't know. there is somehow qualitatively better than the smaller church. And that's just not the case. The church I grew up in was an amazing, vibrant community of faith. It was called the Bea, a church of 80 to 100 people. That's what it was, and it was a great one. So, flourish as you are, and Jason,
[00:40:20] I don't know what caused you to get so amped up
[00:40:21] about the policy.
[00:40:22] But probably there's something of, it feels gross, right?