[00:00:00] So one of my big emphases in addition to the whole idea of pastoral rest and recovery is simplification. And the smaller the church is, the more things need to be simplified. What's fascinating is the biggest, healthiest churches, and I don't mean that they're healthier because they're bigger, I'm just talking about bigger churches that are also healthier. If you look at what they're doing, you will find simplification at the core.
[00:00:27] Welcome to episode 457. As we head into the fall ministry season, we're replaying a wonderful conversation we had a couple years ago with Karl Vaters. Karl is a small church expert and has incredible wisdom for all of us pastors as we think about what it means to not just be a successful church, but a healthy one. That's today on The Reclaimed Leader. Welcome to The Reclaimed Leader Podcast. I'm Jason Tucker.
[00:00:56] And I'm Jesse Skiffington. We're two pastors in the trenches who are passionate about church health for greater gospel impact. We share the ups and downs of ministry, strategies that work for us, and some that didn't. Best practices and practical tools for church leadership. The goal? To help all of our churches flourish. Let's get started. Hey everyone, welcome back to The Reclaimed Leader Podcast. It's so good to be with you again.
[00:01:25] So glad. Thanks for choosing us and for listening. And it's been so great getting to hear from our listeners. And hear about how this podcast has helped you just even start conversations in your church about leading change or just as an encouragement to you to know that there are other pastors going through exactly the same thing that you are. As we are kind of rounding out this summer here, Jesse and I are trying to get a little bit of time away. And it was a great opportunity to share a couple of episodes
[00:01:53] that we really didn't want to get forgotten in the stack, if you will, because now both of them are like over a hundred episodes ago, which is crazy. I can't believe how many episodes this podcast we've actually done. But today we're doing a replay of an episode we did all the way back in episode 326 with Karl Vaters about cultivating healthy churches regardless of size. And it is such a great conversation,
[00:02:20] a great reminder as we head into the fall. And so we thought that we'd replay this one for you. Again, thank you to Carl and for his ministry. Such an amazing resource he is and consider him a wonderful colleague in ministry. And listen, if you've never heard Carl, never read any of his books, I want to encourage you to start. And he's got a few books out. All of his resources that I've come across
[00:02:45] are just super, super good and helpful. And one of the things that he says and really talks about a lot that has stuck with me is this idea that some people think, well, healthy things grow. So, you know, you should have a large church and that's a sign of health. But he also reminds us that unhealthy things
[00:03:05] grow too, like cancer. So, I think it's a good corrective to the kind of prevailing myth of what it looks like to have a healthy church. And I think you'll find it super encouraging. So, let's get into it. This is our conversation we had with Carl Vaders. Well, it is our pleasure to welcome back to the podcast, Karl Vaters. Many of you know him. I don't know if he even needs an introduction, but here you
[00:03:32] go if you don't know Carl. Carl has served in small church ministry for over 40 years, and he speaks and writes from decades of hands-on pastoral experience. He has become the go-to voice in helping small churches thrive. His heart is to help pastors find the resources to lead well and to capitalize on the unique advantages that come with pastoring a small church. He also believes that
[00:03:57] big and small churches can and should work together more often. Carl hosts a bi-weekly podcast, The Church Lobby, Conversations on Faith and Ministry. Episodes feature in-depth interviews about the topics that concern pastors, especially those who minister in a small church context. And he is the author of four books. We know that one's on the way. Maybe he'll tease that for us a little bit today. But welcome back to the podcast, Carl Vaders. It was good to be with you again. Not everybody knows this, but
[00:04:27] some of us who listen to the year-end review episode of our podcast know that you had the number two most downloaded podcast on The Reclaimed Leader Podcast in 2023. So, you know, it's a big honor. I'll take it. I just need to know who I need to defeat next year. That's right. We'll have a hit list for you. There we go.
[00:04:48] So, what I want to start with is, and we'll definitely lean into the 100 Days material, but also last time you were on, you talked about the thing that you kept hearing from pastors all over the country, all the different, you know, seminars and conferences that you were doing. The one thing you heard was not resources, but rest. And we really leaned into that. We did a series on that.
[00:05:16] If anybody wants to go back and listen, it was episode 269 about the greatest need for pastors right now. And it spurred 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
[00:05:41] change. I think maybe it's shifted from rest to recovery. I don't think that it's get back into action again yet from what I'm experiencing, but it's more kind of a long-term sustainability of rest so that we can do the work of ministry. But I'm still seeing this huge need for soul care,
[00:06:01] for emotional care, for recovery. So rest is like, oh, I'm done. I got to collapse. Now, okay, I've collapsed for a little while. I'm not quite ready to jump back into the pace that I had before because the pace that I had before killed me. So how do I incorporate recovery into my regular routine?
[00:06:25] That's, I think, where we are right now. And that's a good place that we are taking much more care for and thought about how do we recover from the output of ministry by regular input rather than waiting for another collapse. Yeah. I think with what I'm seeing with small church pastors too,
[00:06:49] is there's a lot of kind of predetermined defeat, right? It's the sense, well, what was Ed Stetzer's last quote I just saw? 175,000 churches under 100 people in attendance or 70% of churches worshiping under 100. So this is just how it is. It's a foregone conclusion. This is how it's going
[00:07:11] to go. And I'm getting a lot of kind of defeated pastors that are coming to me. I mean, this did a consultation in near Little Rock, Arkansas, which I think our planes were literally crossing. I think you also were consulting in Arkansas at the same time. And the thing that I heard from several churches that I spoke to was, listen, we just don't have the people to do the things and I can't do all the
[00:07:37] things. So therefore we're not going to do anything. Is that kind of what you're, what you're seeing? Or maybe you've seen a little more positive movement. No, I think, I think you're right. What I saw for years was a constant effort to do all the things, no matter how big or small the church was. And especially for the small church, you're trying to do all the things the big church does only smaller. And what you end up doing is all of them
[00:08:03] 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 going to 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 a different, in addition to the whole idea of pastoral rest and recovery is simplification. And the smaller the church is, the more things need to be simplified. What's fascinating is
[00:08:31] the biggest, healthiest churches, and I don't mean that they're healthier because they're bigger. I'm just talking about bigger churches that are also healthier. If you look at what they're doing, you will find simplification at the core of their healthfulness, no matter how big they are. We look at it and we see all kinds of stuff, but they have a really core through line that is very simple. We do this. And for small churches, it needs to be a very simple statement of this is who we are.
[00:09:02] And also a simplification of the calendar that you're not going to be able to have the schedule and all of the programs that big churches have, because one, you can't do it. But two, it actually ends up reducing your effectiveness rather than increasing it. And this is a good transition, I think, to the 100 days resource that you have, 100 days to a healthier
[00:09:28] church. I really thought it did a very nice job of clearly and plainly and simply saying, this is a process for you to walk through. And as you and I know, in revitalization, probably most things in life, it's about the process. I mean, what do athletes say? Trust the process, right? Because you're not seeing all the results when you're working on it. But if you trust it and you have a good
[00:09:55] process and you simplify, you get it in your head what your win is going to be or however you want to phrase it, then you can make progress. And what I love is in the little preamble to the book, you said, what was it? The preamble, it was the pre-step. He said, don't expect you're going to go through this process, small church, and you're going to be a booming, numerically growing, you're not going to go from zero to 100. You actually had a really nice little diagram of a
[00:10:23] continuum. And you're like, you're not going to go from like a negative 10 toxic church to a plus 10 very healthy church in 100 days. But you can make, everybody can make some healthy progress. So maybe share with us as a way of beginning, 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
[00:10:54] and to help their church get some, some life and some energy? The reason I concentrate on healthy church is because for so many years, I tried to build a big church and it burnt me out, nearly, nearly killed me and nearly killed the healthy church that I was pastoring. And then when did I started realizing, okay, I'm going to, we're just going to concentrate on health, not health as a step to get bigger, but simply healthfulness for the sake of healthfulness, for the sake of effectiveness in ministry, for the sake of fulfilling God's call
[00:11:21] upon our lives. Because here's the deal. If you take a small and unhealthy church and all you do is make it big, you now have a big unhealthy church and that's not good. That's bad. But if you take a small and unhealthy church and you make it healthy, even if it doesn't get bigger, healthy is always better. So you can, you can lose, you can actually lose with big. In fact, the new book, what you mentioned earlier coming out soon, soon called desizing the church actually talks about some
[00:11:47] of the dangers of bigness. That's the premise of it. And that you can big, you can lose with big, you can't lose with healthy. Yeah. Again, it can't be healthy only as a step towards bigness because that, and that way bigness becomes the goal and not health. And at some point or another, you're 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
[00:12:14] 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. We are going to be the healthiest and most effective church that we can given what, given the resources that God has given us. And we will be satisfied with that without ever getting settled in that. The burden that was lifted off of my shoulders and the
[00:12:40] empowerment to the congregation was extraordinary. Yeah. That's really powerful. And I think helpful as, I mean, God's metric that he cares about is faithfulness, right? I mean, so why is it, do you think, is it just the American way that, or that all the attention goes to the big mega churches? And I guess, you know, a lot of them are the speakers at the big conferences and is it, is it, well, that's what success must be. And that's what we're sort of stuck in, you think?
[00:13:11] It's interesting that you mentioned that. This podcast isn't intended to be a sales pitch for the new book, but you actually mentioned a phrase that's central to the new book that's coming out, desizing the church. What I did was I looked around and I asked the question you just asked, what is this bigness thing? Where does it come from? Because nothing comes from nowhere. This obsession with bigness had to come from somewhere. And you even mentioned, is it an American thing? It turns out, yeah, it actually is. So what I did was I did the research
[00:13:38] on the church growth movement and I actually discovered there were two church growth movements. There was the one that had been called that, that was started by Donald McGavron in the 1970s, a name who's almost forgotten today, but his influence is absolutely massive. And a lot of the negatives of the church growth movement were attributed to him wrongfully. He understood, he was actually a missionary in India. He did some study in Africa. He wanted
[00:14:06] to understand how people movements came to Christ. How do you increase the percentage of Christians as in the general population of a community rather than how do you make churches bigger? And when he actually started the church growth institute at Fuller, he set it up so that American pastors wouldn't qualify because his thought was if American pastors get a hold of these ideas, they'll turn it into a big church contest rather than turning it into how do people movements come
[00:14:36] to Christ. And eventually he had to relent and let Americans in. And sure enough, that's what we did. And in the book, I go through all of the, what is it about American history that we like the bigger and the newer? And it comes from some, it's the unintended negative consequence of some very, very good things about being American. I'll just leave it at that for now.
[00:15:00] Yeah. Yeah. Well also, so I often ask myself the question, why do I care about the trajectory of the Sunday attendance number? Why do, why is that one of our metrics that we're always looking at? And why is it that we want to celebrate when we have more and more people coming? For me, there's a line and on the healthy side of the line, it's about what just, what fuels me is evangelism.
[00:15:28] That's, that's my number one. And it's not close. I just want to reach as many people as I could possibly reach with the gospel of Jesus Christ. And for me, that's where that kind of ties in with, Hey, are we reaching more people? But there, it's not a big step to get to the unhealthy side of that line. And I think, do you think it's true? I sense that it's true from smaller church pastors that
[00:15:58] there's also an unhealthy side of the line saying, well, and listing all the bad things about big churches. So therefore we're not going to try to go out and to, and to grow into this. We have our people, we're going to do our thing. I feel like there's kind of an unhealthy side of that that happens as well in reaction to. Yeah. Far too many churches out there that are settling for where they are at varying sizes.
[00:16:26] But yeah, we, we, there's never any sense in the ministry that I do of settling for less. It is always about utilizing the resources that you have right now to do right now, what Jesus is calling your church to do right now. And, um, the, the way that that happens today actually is with things like what we're talking about, you and I right now are talking over zoom,
[00:16:52] right? So there, there are opportunities right now to reach out to people who aren't, who don't have to be in your building in order for you to reach them. Yeah. So a generation ago, there might have been some excuse for if there aren't more people in the building on Sunday, then we obviously aren't reaching the community that that made some sense a generation ago. I, I, I would argue that it didn't really, but it, there was at least a logical
[00:17:21] through line to that today. That's not the case at all today. You know, 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 physically meeting with God's people if you're able to. Um, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be in my church anymore. Yeah.
[00:17:51] So, uh, that, you know, people, I think you used the phrase earlier, we want to reach people for Christ, which I get, but I think even we could shift that to, I want to see people reach for Christ. Whether I reach them or not, or whether I'm participating in a parachurch organization or helping your church reach people for Christ, as long as people are being reached for Christ and I can somehow participate in that, I'm happy. And if it doesn't happen to put butts in the
[00:18:16] seats on Sunday morning for me, we've got to get to the point where we're okay with that. That's really hard to do. I'm still not fully okay with that. And I'm the guy who's supposed to be teaching everybody else this. So I know how deeply embedded it gets into us, but that's where we got to get. Yeah. So let's jump into the resource, 100 days to a healthier church. What, what is it about this
[00:18:43] process you think that just absolutely works for smaller churches? And then maybe let's just take a quick walk. I want everyone to buy the resource, but I want everyone to quickly walk through the steps that you outline. It's a 15 week program where it's like, it's very well and easy to follow. Like, I feel like it's just super effective. So tell us a little bit about the resource and then maybe you can walk us through a couple of the steps. Well, I'm thrilled to be talking about it. It was released in March of 2020.
[00:19:10] 2020. So, um, that's why it wasn't on my radar for a while. It wasn't on anybody's radar. It dropped like a thud, like even all the promo stuff we had ready to go. We're like, Oh no, that wouldn't be appropriate. Oh no, we can't do that. And I just thought this book will never be read by anybody. We'll never sell. And, but now that we're kind of out of that, people are beginning to find it. And it's nice that I'm being able to have
[00:19:34] conversations about it. What happened was for a good 15 to 20 years at our church, um, I came into a church that was very, um, very hurting, uh, uh, that had gone through five pastors in the previous 10 years, there was all kinds of problems. And I didn't have a process that worked in a small church to go to. And so I begged, borrowed and stole from churches that I saw were examples, but most of what
[00:20:04] 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. It just, it couldn't be adapted over to my size to the point where I thought either, either they're wrong or I'm stupid. It turned out the big church pastors weren't wrong. It works in their context and I wasn't stupid. It didn't work in my context. And so over the years I would find bits and pieces that did work
[00:20:31] until I had this thing together. And then I looked back and I looked at back at this 15 to 20 year process and went, Oh, okay, here's what we did over these 15 to 20 years. I wonder how much we could concentrate that and into what frame of time people could actually do that in if they had the roadmap out ahead of them instead of wandering for 40 years in the wilderness, what would it be like to have a map and some GPS and actually get there in a reasonable period of time? And a hundred days was what worked.
[00:21:00] A hundred days is very intense, but if you spread it out even over a year or two, it starts to water down a little bit and the enthusiasm and the adrenaline starts to fade. So that's where it came from. These are actually the things that our church did, finding them in any way that we could over 15 to 20 year process, boiled down and made universal. 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
[00:21:30] 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 any size church. It's not just for my church. It's not just for big churches. It's not even just for small churches. But these are biblical principles that work anywhere.
[00:21:53] I 100% agree. In fact, our process that we teach is very similar. And it's the same process I used in a mid-sized church that became a large church. The same process. We just have different language around it. We call it the three Ds, discover, discern, decide. But it's really the same stuff. This works for any size church. So if you're leading a mid-sized or larger church and you're listening, this 100 days to a healthier
[00:22:21] church will work for you as well. It's nice to hear that confirmation. I felt that when I was putting it out. But we were talking even before the podcast started, when you're pastoring on a Sunday, you know if your stuff is working right away, kind of like a stand-up comedian, because you get the laugh right back or you get the response, whatever that would be, as a pastor. But when you put a book out, you don't know, you feel like it's the right thing and 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.
[00:22:51] Thank you, Jason. 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 72 hours or something. And it's really dramatic and makes for good TV. But he does the same thing. It's, you know, the assessing and all of the things. But I won't steal that from you. Maybe you could just walk us through what are some of the steps here in the 100 days? Now, the way it's
[00:23:19] divided into certain weeks. Share a little bit for those who are unfamiliar, just kind of an outline of that. Yeah, 100 days begins with a Saturday, Sunday weekend, and it ends with a Saturday, Sunday weekend. So that was one of those nice little things when I looked at the 100. Because it's nice when you get the double zero, if it had been, you know, 98 days and start and end on a weekend, but it just gone, oh, no. But it matched up to be exactly 100. So the way the book is broken down,
[00:23:45] it starts with what to do before the 100 days, with things like, you know, get better before you get bigger. And, you know, why is 100 days helpful? It turns out when you're developing a habit for years, we were told, you know, it takes 30 days to develop a habit. That turns out that's not even close to right. It's much closer to 100 days. It's like 90 to 120 days. And so 100 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
[00:24:11] 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. We don't begin with some new trend that's going around. We begin looking at scripture and asking, what did Jesus say his church was supposed to do? And who did Jesus say his church was supposed to be? He's the owner.
[00:24:37] He's the one who's building it. What does it mean to reestablish that? And what I've found and what I've heard back reflected from other pastors is how many of them come back after that because they read it and they go, oh, that's just such basic stuff. Everybody knows it. When they actually walk people through it in this context, they're amazed at how many church members come back and go, I didn't know that. Like the basic stuff about who Jesus said his church is supposed to be. So you start by assessing your situation. Who did Jesus say your church is supposed to be?
[00:25:06] And where might we be falling short of that that we can work on? So that's the first step. The second one is select a target. Find one, what I like to call the early easy win. What is a way that you can get one step closer to this? As you mentioned earlier, the continuum. We look at a continuum from a negative 10 toxic to a positive 10, a church that's actually perfect and should just simply float up to heaven right now. But most of us are somewhere in the middle of that. So if you're on the negative side of that from a negative three at a negative three, for instance,
[00:25:37] and this is also fairly subjective, maybe in a hundred days, you can get to negative two. In some dangerous churches, some really difficult churches where the problems have been so ingrained for so long, in a hundred days, you can go from negative four facing towards negative 10 to negative four facing towards positive 10. So you actually aren't healthier. In fact,
[00:26:03] that happened to me when I went through a real crisis of ministry about 15 years ago, when I came out of my approximately a hundred days is what it happened to be. And I came back to the church and I was feeling better again. I realized I'm actually in the same place I was before, but now what I'm looking at ahead is an upward trajectory rather than a downward trajectory. So for some churches, it's going to be the turnaround and then you can go at the hundred day process again with something, but you've got to pick one thing that you're going to work on.
[00:26:33] And then thirdly, you've got to find and train a team that's going to work with you. So the larger the church is, the smaller a percentage of your members that 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. So one of the things to actually talk about is how to help it self-select. Like we're going to have this meeting about how we're going to turn the church around. Everybody is invited.
[00:26:59] And then everybody who shows up is on the team. And then a couple months down the road when you're doing new stuff and somebody comes and complains, well, how come I'm not on the team? You can go, everybody was invited. You didn't show up for the meeting. You self-selected not to be a part of this. So you find and you train the team and then you implement the plan. And at the end of it, you celebrate what God has done. And then you kind of recalibrate to go ahead. That's the very simple, bare bones of what the skeleton looks like of it.
[00:27:28] It's really good. And again, folks can pick up that book. I even saw that it was on an audio book. And I have to ask, did you narrate it or did someone else? I didn't. I've actually talked to my publisher and told them on the next book, if we do audio book, I want to be the guy who reads it. What happened was I was traveling so much when they did the audio book. We just couldn't match up our calendars, but I'm going to make sure I do it on the next one. All right. That's good. You also have resources like worksheets that go along with this. So
[00:27:57] carlvados.com forward slash hundred days, you can get worksheets and it really takes you step by step, week by week. I wanted to ask you this because I know you mentioned it before is we talk a lot about the challenges of small churches. What are some of the advantages? Yeah, I love to. And before I say this, I want to say, because while talking about the advantages, it may sound to some like I'm saying something bad about big churches and I'm not.
[00:28:25] We can talk good about one without talking bad about the other. So because I think there are great values to big churches as well. Yeah. One of the advantages of the small church, almost all of them center around relationships. So it is true when people say it doesn't matter if the pastor knows you, it just matters that somebody in the church knows you. That is absolutely true. But not for everybody. There are some people for whom their spiritual growth and their inspiration
[00:28:55] to do greater ministry, a big part of that is that the pastor knows their name, is that the pastor's preaching on Sunday is someone that they can text on Tuesday and say, hey, I have a question about my Bible reading. What does this mean to you? And if the stats are any indication, and I think they are, about half the Christians in the world need that. And that's why they're attending smaller churches. But about half the Christians in the world don't need that. They attend bigger churches.
[00:29:22] And I've talked to staff members of mega churches who have been on staff for years and have never had a conversation with the lead pastor because the lead pastor is leading two, three, four, or 500 staff members. And they're okay with that. And that's an okay thing to be. But for those who do want to have that closer connection with the pastor and with the other church leaders, that's really an important part of it. And so on the pastor end of things, here's something I want to encourage pastors to do.
[00:29:48] I believe the smaller your church is, the greater obligation you have to meet every new person and to spend time in the church lobby. In fact, that's part of the reason that my podcast is called The Church Lobby is because, especially in a small church, you can tell more about the health of a church by what happens in the church lobby than by what happens on the church stage. Yeah. We put our best foot forward on the church stage. And we all know that there are churches
[00:30:15] that have been putting on great performances on the stage only to find that there's a toxic rot that you don't discover until you walk through the church lobby. So in the small church, you can see whether or not the lobby and the stage are in sync more quickly than you can see it in a big church. Numbers can hide cancer in a big church. Numbers can't hide the cancer as easily in a small church.
[00:30:42] There are cancers in small churches just like there are in big churches, but it's usually easier to see in a small church because of that. So you've got 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. And by the way, thank you for not calling it Church Narthex, calling it Church Lobby. I appreciate that. Boy, yay.
[00:31:14] So thanks so much for being on, Carl. And I want to encourage everyone to go out and to get the 100 Days to a Healthier Church. CarlVaders.com forward slash 100 days for those worksheets. And I'd love for you, if you don't mind, to tease the book a little more. We got a new book coming out this spring, and hopefully we'll have you back on. We'll talk about that book once it's released. But share a little bit more about this. I'm really fascinated. First of all, I love the title, and I love the concept.
[00:31:45] The title is Desizing the Church. The subtitle is How Church Growth Became a Science, Then an Obsession, and What's Next. So as I mentioned earlier, I did this deep dive into church growth history, discovered that there are these two church growth movements that intersected 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 it is Why is Bigness So Dangerous?
[00:32:12] One chapter is about Christian celebrity. And I call it inevitable why Christian celebrity is inevitably going to be a danger to us and why bigness is so dangerous to us. I talk about there's a full chapter on what the church growth movement got right, because church growth movement did a lot of stuff right. And then there's a chapter about where it went sideways. And we can assess
[00:32:39] it now because the church growth movement has been in our consciousness for 40 years. Even if today, we typically even don't use the term church growth as much anymore. It has been in our consciousness and a part of the way that we've done church often in invisible ways for a full 40 years, which is now enough for us to be able to look back and give it an accurate assessment. And my goal is not to put it down, but to assess it accurately and to see some of the downsides that maybe we haven't
[00:33:08] paid attention to before. So that third part of the book, we can move forward. And the real maybe crux of it for me is this, the way forward is not going to be programmatic. Nobody is deconstructing their faith because the programs in the church weren't done with enough excellence.
[00:33:33] Yeah. People who are walking away from the faith aren't upset that the bass player screwed up the bass line in the second worship song. Yeah. People who are calling themselves terms like exvangelical and so on are doing so not because of technical failure failures, but because of failures of integrity. And so I push really hard. I have a chapter entitled integrity is the new competence.
[00:34:00] We've spent 40 years teaching processes and systems, and it's time to spend at least another 40 years reteaching integrity. Because if you're going to see people fall away from the faith, it's not because the bass player screwed up. It's because the pastor or somebody else in the church hurt them. They weren't the people of integrity that they should have been. And so we've got to get this right again. So that's really where the book kind of ends up. And then even at the end, give us some practical
[00:34:26] ways to look at how do we de-size the church? How do we de-size the pastor? And the very last chapter, even I get into how do we de-size evangelicalism? So yeah, I step into some interesting places in this one. You're not messing around. Yeah, no, I put some steel-toed boots on for when this thing releases. I love it, Carl. Well, I'm looking forward to that book. And again, thanks for being on, for the encouragement you are and the wonderful resource you are for pastors of all-size churches.
[00:34:56] 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 metric that he cares about the most, having a good process, but making sure that process isn't divorced from your own discipleship. And man, just all great stuff. I'm so encouraged by you, Carl. I know others are too. CarlVaders.com. Is that the best way to kind of track and follow what you're doing?
[00:35:23] If you want to reach out, there's a contact me button right there that you can reach out for anything and I'll try to respond as much as I can. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for being back on the podcast and God bless you. Hopefully we'll see you again here in the next couple of months. Man, Carl is so good and so helpful. And what a wonderful reminder as we head into this next ministry season. I don't know what's going on in the life of your church or what sort of challenges you're
[00:35:48] facing, but man, if we, if we can really focus on what it means to be healthy, I think a lot of these other things that we're working on will all kind of come together. So next week, we have a fresh episode for you where Jesse and I talk about 10 quick tips to maximize your fall ministry. That'll be episode 458. And then after that, which would be an episode, I think both of these episodes are in September. We're going to do a replay of a conversation we had with Greg Atkinson,
[00:36:17] who he's an expert on church welcoming guest services. And we just thought this was a great one to air right before, you know, the big fall season when we get a lot of guests or get visitors and great reminders on how to do that. Well, so thank you so much, everyone. Again, reach out Jason or Jesse at reclaimleader.com. And until next time ministry is hard. It is so much better when we do it together.