Steve Pike, founder-Next Wave Community; church planter; author, Discovering the 21st Century Church

0:00 The topics and opinions express in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests, and not those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability explicit or implies shall be extended to W four CY Radio or it's employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY Radio. Churchill said, those who failed to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Kevin Helenan believes that certainly applies to business. Welcome to Winning Business Radio here at W four CY Radio. That's W four cy dot com and now your host, Kevin Helena, Welcome back and thanks for joining in today once again. I am Kevin Haleanan and this is Winning Business TV and Radio on w CY dot com. We're streaming live on talk for tv dot com in addition to Facebook, and that's at Winning Business Radio.

1:07 And of course we're available in podcasts after the live show on tons of outlets including YouTube, iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple, pretty much wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts, you can get a sense of that list at Winning Business radio dot com. The mission of the show, as regular listeners know, is to offer insights and advice to help people avoid the mistakes of others, right to learn best practices. Those are the how tos, the what tos, the what not tos, And I always say to be challenged and hopefully to be inspired by the successes of others. But you know, virtually every successful person I've ever had a chance to talk to has had some form of failure in their lives and careers. So while we all have to get our knees skinned once in a while, I keep saying I'm driven to keep those scrapes from needing major surgery. Let's endeavor to learn from history so we don't repeat it today. My guest is Steve Pike. He's founder of next waveci Community, veteran church planter, and author of Discovering the twenty first Century Century Church, as well as the soon to be released Next Wave Understanding the twenty first Century Church. Here's his bio. Steve Pike serves as the catalyst for the next Wave Virtual Community, an online community of church leaders committed to being with Jesus on his mission in the challenging twenty first century context. He's also the president and founder of Urban Islands Project, a national excuse Me collaborative organization dedicated to increasing the presence of the Church in the core of America's urbanized communities.

2:35 Additionally, Steve serves as an executive coach with Accelerate and as part of the coaching consulting consulting team at the Answer Group. Prior to taking on his current responsibilities, Steve was the founding director of the Church Multiplication Network. CMN serves church multipliers to effectively equip, strategically fund, and innovatively innovatively network new faith communities community as WOW in America. Since its formation in two thousand and eight, CMN has assisted with the starting of over forty five hundred new congregations in every region of the US. Steve is the author of the soon to be released book The Reimagines Church, which is a follow up to the bestseller Next Way of Discovering the Twenty first Century Church, an author of Total Fitness for Your Church, and co author with doctor Tim tom Nebell Hope I said that correctly, Tom of leading church multiplication. Steve's passion for church multiplication began in nineteen eighty nine when he and his wife Cherry, pioneered a new church that became the catalyst of a church planting movement in the state of Utah that continues to this day. The Pikes make their home in Denver, Colorado.

3:37 They're blessed to be the parents of Lindsay and Jeremy, and the grandparents of Miles, Cohen, Wesley, James, and Amelia. When he's not working with church and nonprofit leaders, Steve enjoys outdoor adventures with his family in the grandeur of his home state of Colorado. Steve, Welcome to Winning Business Radio and TV. Appreciate you being here. Thanks Kevin, It's great to be with you today. I hope I pronounced everything correctly. Yeah, you're a close enough. Nebel is how you say Tom's name? Nebel? Okay, sorry, Tom, thank you. I'll get it right next time. So listen before we get started. I'm sure there are some in the viewing and listening audiences that are thinking, hey, Kevin, this is a show about business, right, so business successes in challenges? Why do you have a Christian church guy in here. Well, it's a fair question, and I want to address it, and I want to hear your thoughts. A church is a community believers. Okay, we get that, But a church also has business related challenges like financial stability, growth decline, marketing, and messaging, leadership, and the list goes on. Right, So even Jim Collins, we all know Good to Great has a companion for nonprofits. It's a companion material for nonprofits. So as a christ follower who spends a fair amount of time in church, quote in church and served on two boards for many years, I've seen those challenges firsthand. And when I first met Steve a couple of months ago in Boston, I knew I wanted to share. I wanted him to share his insights and believe that many of the audience will get value. So you want to add anything to that? No, I think you've all what do you want to know? All right? So let's start with your background. Where'd you grow up? I knew home home is Colorado?

5:09 But whereabouts? Yeah, if if you followed my journey, you'd think I might be trying to stay one step above the law or ahead of the law. I was born in the state of Washington, kind of grew up in Oregon. I went to high school in Ohio, got married, and moved to Florida. I lived in Jersey, I lived in Utah, I lived in outside of Chicago. Now I'm in Denver and Springfield, Missouri. Was another place all over the place. So when you were young, you know, kind of like coming up in a high school. In high school, what were your early interests? What were you into? Oh man, you know, I wanted to be an astronaut, no kidding, that was yeah, So I was very I was just a total nerd about anything having to do with space. Even even went so far as to apply to go to the Air Force Academy. I did some research, and I felt that was the best way to becoming at was to go through that path, and started down that path, and then felt like God directed me in a different direction and all the ministry. Yeah, I think I would have enjoyed space.

6:15 I mean, long story short, I didn't do well my first semester freshmen in school. I figured out the second. But I came back around Christmas and said to my dad, I'm joining the army. It was seventy nine, post Vietnam. He said, heck, no, you're going back to school. So I wish I had been in the military, but today I think i'd go into Space Force. Yes, yeah, I would too. Yeah, so you chose Southeastern University in Florida and he focused on a ministerial degree. What was behind that were those decisions? Well, that's a great question. The bottom line is, I actually felt like God directed me to go to Southeastern University. And it was actually a surprise because, as I said, I was actually in the process of going to the Air Force Academy. Really felt like that I had already reached out to get the endorsements I needed and all that kind of stuff. It's pretty far down the pathway toward that, and I just felt like God kind of interrupted that trajectory and sent me in the direction of Southeastern. That's cool. That's cool. And you met your wife there. I did so transition to tell us about your wife and your grown kids. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My wife grew up in Florida, so she's one of the few people that actually were born and raised in Florida. Most people they call them snowbirds or you know, aports or whatever. My brother, his kids, I'm telling you, even his kids didn't grow up there. No, yeah, she actually did until I came along, and then I took her everywhere else. But so she's

7:47 an original Florida girl. And then we had two kids, Jeremy and Lindsay, and they are now married and they all have so they've given us grandkids, which, as some people say, the grandkids are God's reward for not killing your kids when they were teenagers. Great, all right, so you started, and I'm taking you back here, but we'll go, you know, we won't take too much time here. But I wanted people to hear kind of your career progression. I mean, how do you get to write a book about ministry and about church growth and have these secrets not really secrets, but you know, reveal what you've learned. Well, you started, as many did, or do still. I think I don't know as many do that do now. But as a youth pastor in Jacksonville, tell us a bit about that role and your most important takeaway from that first role.

8:35 Yeah, yeah, that's a great, Yeah, that was. That was actually my second youth pastorate position. The first one was in New Jersey, which was kind of a culture shock, and that's actually the first place I learned something about the different sort of personalities of regions of the country. You know, we were I was going to school in Florida, but then we moved to New Jersey, and you know, the culture was just really really different. It was just different. I mean, it wasn't better or worse, it was just different. It was an interesting experience, and that taught me something about, Okay, if you're going to do business or ministry somewhere, it's important to understand what people are like in that region of the country and just have a general understanding of that. Jacksonville was so the first church I was at was kind of a When I went there, I think there were I don't know, four or five hundred people part of the church, fairly good sized church, but it grew to like a thousand people I was there in two years. It just blew up. And then the same thing happened in Florida, so I started to think that was normal. But one of the key things I learned in the church in Jacksonville was just how to really recognize what the leaders that I'm working under, what their priorities are, and understand. You know, I was a pretty young smart alec guy that thought I knew everything. I know that that doesn't characterize you or anybody else but that. And you know, the pastor at one point I was sort

10:07 of challenging some ideas that he had to, trying to tell him how he was wrong about some stuff, and he basically just very gently and kindly pulled me aside and said, look, I'm the senior pastor, you're not. You know, if it comes down to what I want, what you want, it's going to be what I want. That's just the way the world works. Until you figure that out, you're going to be pretty frustrated. And that was an important lesson that I learned there, I think, was just how to how to function in a It was it fairly that church was you know, started out around five hundred and went to fifteen hundred you know while I was there, and so I you know, we had a lot of moving parts and things like that. So anyway, that was that lesson learned. And then Naville High School pastor, Yeah, that was so that was a really big church. That was you know, twenty five hundred, three thousand people sort of multiple mega church. Yeah, multiple services. You know, I had two hundred kids in my class, in my Sunny school class, you know, in the youth group where you know, we'd have a youth event, we'd have a thousand kids show up and stuff like that.

11:09 So it was a whole different ballgame than anything I'd previously been part of. And you know, that was where I think I started to get a taste. A lot of the people in Aperville is a very strong it's it's kind of a bedroom community of Chicago, and most of the people live in Naperville. We're in the middle management to upper management of big companies and corporations and stuff based in Chicago, And so I found myself working with the kids of very high level leaders and and that was where I really first became introduced to, I guess, some of the complexities and the challenges of really leading complicated, large organizations. So that was that experience there for four years, and you had some organizational structure, no doubt, you had either I don't know what you called them, we used to call ourselves youths staff or how many people did you have in your life? Yeah, yeah, Well, so the youth staff there were three There was a high school pastor, a college pastor, and junior high pastor. I was a high school pastor, and then you know, we all had everything that we were paid, but then everybody else were volunt volunteer. But you know, we I had a I don't know, twenty five or thirty volunteers that worked with me to pull that off, you know. So again I learned some stuff about working with volunteers and people who don't get paid anything, they don't have to show up, and so you have to learn how to help them be excited about what they're doing beyond just getting a paycheck, you know. Yeah, and is that right after that? Was that Ogden where you started you planned? Right?

12:41 Yeah, yeah, so we're you know, well, let me just mention this for kind of a non church person, many of whom are listening. Yeah, churches don't always they're not always there. It might seem like it's some of the older buildings and churches, but no, churches have a beginning and a growth path, right, So, yes, you started a church, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, so we're you know, up to that point, I had been part of existing churches all my life, although I'd had some thoughts along the way about wow, I think there's this a place that needs a church. So that was kind of in me, but I didn't have it wasn't time to pull the trigger on that. But at this point, four years into it, I really saw an opportunity and need for a new church to be started at all places in Ogden, Utah.

13:30 It's a way too long of a story to explain how I concluded that, but yeah, you're right. I mean the churches, every church actually at some point had a beginning. I mean, they don't just always exist. And I think sometimes people do see these old buildings with moss anonymous, and we think, well, that's just always been here. But at some point even the old buildings with moss were an idea in somebody's head or a sense of calling. You a pastor would say, a sense of calling, excuse me. And so we had this sense of calling to go start a church in Utah and help people there follow Jesus. And yeah, so we moved there. It was a in church planning world we call a parachute drop.

14:13 We just you know, parachuted out of the plane metaphorically speaking. We had no no visible means of support, except for we did raise some support from some churches and individuals who said, man, we we think that this is something that is a good thing. We want to help you do that. So we got some some kind of monthly support to give us to be able to put food on the table and you know, have a house over our head or roof over our head and stuff like that in the startup phase until the congregation formed. And so yeah, it was after the race. Is my first church planning experience. Well, I have more questions about Ogden, but this time for our first break, we're going to be back in just about a minute. Steve everybody else will be back with Steve Pike in about sixty seconds. You're listening to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helene on W four CY Radio. That's W four cy dot com. Don't go away.

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16:03 Here once again is Kevin Helenett. We're back with Steve Pike. He is the founder of Next Wave Community, veteran church planter, author of Discovering the twenty first Century Church as well as soon to be released Next Wave Understanding the twenty first Century Church. So, you know, the Northeast, to me, the Northeast has you know, Catholic churches everywhere, some Baptists, mostly Catholic churches. So for someone planting a church in the Northeast, most of the people you're reaching out to are Catholic, right, just their tradition. In Ogden, it's LDS, right. Was that a challenge? Okay?

16:49 Yeah, yeah, well definitely Utah and Ogden. We're not at the top of the church planter's favorite place to go list, yes, so yes, most of the people In fact, you know this actual statistics, I think we're around sixty seven to seventy percent of the people would identify as people members of the LDS. Church, or they would be friends of the LDS church. Probably about half of those were actually active people, and then the other The interesting about Utah is the other twenty nine percent. So that you got about thirty or seventy percent LDS, twenty nine percent, well, let me flip it. Around one percent would or less than one percent would identify as Christian, and then about twenty nine percent would identify as very anti religious, not just so very you know, we felt kind of like the story about shoe salesman who arrives at a place and you know, there's two of them. They go to the same place and one writes back after a week and he goes, man, I cannot sell any shoes here because nobody wears shoes. I love. The other guy writes back and says, this is awesome. I can shell sell shoes to everyone because nobody wears shoes. So, you know, we decided to have the attitude of the second guy and say, Okay, yeah, nobody's really interested in the church here, but there's people that are here that are people who they don't know it yet, but they would like to have a relationship with Jesus, and we want to help them find Jesus, So that was kind of our attitude, and incredibly

18:23 enough, we saw that happen. We saw hundreds and hundreds of people become followers of Jesus over the years, and we helped start five other churches in Yuzah during that same decade. And that's where I kind of got bit with the church planting and church multiplication bug. And what years were those that would have been the nineties from basically the beginning of nineteen ninety to the end to the beginning of twenty of two thousand was ten years. Yeah, so that seems to me to be pre kind of church planting, pre arc pre yeah. Oh yeah, man, pre you know all that right, right, yeah, yeah, there was towards the end of the nineties that's when some of the more intentional things began to happen. There was actually a thing called the Church Muliplication Institute, I think was what it was called at the time, and a guy named Bob Logan created the church Planter's Toolkit. But that was all that stuff was created after we'd already started the church, you know.

19:21 So yeah, we we just had to pray a lot and figure it out, and again, by God's grace we did. Yeah, all right, So then, if I'm following the timeline, you took a denominational or regional district level leadership role church director of church planting and development in Colorado, Tellis, Yeah. Yeah, So the way that the denomination was organized was Colorado and Utah were one region called the Rocky Mountain. At that time, it was called the Rocky Mountain District. Now we call it the Rocky Mountain Network whatever, just different cooler names. But yeah, so I went. I'd lived in Ogden for ten years and then was approached by the district and they said, we'd like you to do for the whole district what you've been doing in Utah, and so we felt like that was the right thing for us to do. So yeah, we moved to Colorado Springs and worked from there and helped start churches throughout not just Utah but also Colorado. And that again, what what what's happening for me as I make these different changes was you know, my goodness, Utah culture was dramatically different from the culture of Naperville that I came from. And then and then going to Colorado. Colorado, you've got people on the plains that are ranchers and farmers and stuff.

20:38 Then you have the Front Range, which is where Denver and it's very it's you know, it's pretty urban and uh and and you know, every all the problems of large cities you're going to find in Denver and some of the large cities along the Front Range. Then you have the mountain communities, the resort communities. But then on the they call it the West Slope like Rifle and Injunction, everybody's got gun wrecks in the back of their pickups and there, you know, there they're farmers and ranchers and it's the Old West. And then you get to Utah, which is, you know, its own personal thing. So we had to you know, every time somebody said, hey, I want to plant a church, you know, I had to think, Okay, where do you feel like you're supposed to be going and help them navigate the the mega or the local cultural difference that they were going to experience, because planning in church in Denver is not the same as Yuma, you know, which is way out on the eastern plains, and it's not the same as Veil or you know, in Grand Junction or Salt Lake City. You know, so every place is a little different, so you can't just do the same thing every place and expect the same kind of results that sounds familiar. In fact, then you moved into a national denominational leadership role, actually three roles as I saw it, I think so administrator US missions, Director of church planting and Development, and then director of the founding director of Church Multiplication Network, right those organizations. Well this, yeah, yeah, this is where I had to learn how to navigate big organizations.

22:11 This was a very complicated, large organization. The national office for this denomination had over one thousand employees in that one building in Springfield, Missouri. So and we served thirteen almost thirteen thousand churches, three million constituents just in the United States. But then the American Church also served as kind of the kind of the lead church for the entire world. And you know, this denomination had something at that time, I think about sixty seventy million people worldwide, about two hundred and fifty thousand churches. So it's a really big, complicated, multi layered organization. And I found myself so sort of yanked out of being in a small version of that to just being all of a sudden, man, I've got all these The language we use was publics. We have all these different publics we have to communicate with constituents. Public yeah, yeah, yes, yes, but they're like you know, some of they're different layers of leaders, different responsibilities. We had to interact with all of them.

23:18 And it was in the middle of all that MAYLEEU that I had to kind of figure out. I went there kind of a little bit confused as to I knew. I felt like I was supposed to be there. It was a great opportunity, but I felt like what I had a vision for was really going to be hard to pull off within the confines of a very established At this point that we were about the organization about ready to celebrate its hundredth anniversary. And churches are probably more stuck than any business ever gets when it comes to, you know, just honoring tradition and keeping things the same stasis is the way they tend to go rather than you know, changing and flexing and stuff like that. And what I felt like needed to have happened with some pretty pretty radical restructuring. And so the bottom line is, uh, I described my time there. I was there for eight and a half years, and I liken it to four levels of a video game where at each level you have to kind of you know, you win, you kill the dragon orders and save the princess, and you get to go to the next level. Yeah, and I had to so when I first got there, I had to kind of read the reality of what I was facing and win that first version and so on all the way through. So in doing so, that's when I was I was actually able to start this organization within the organization called Church Muliplication Network, which which gave the proper, i would say, the proper emphasis to starting new churches for this older organization. And

24:51 it gave us a rallying place. It gave us an organizational hub, It gave us resources, all kinds of stuff to begin to really that that organization a welcome place for people who felt like they're supposed to start a church. We we created a way for them they could contact us and we okay, we can help you do this. You're not by yourself and you have all this whole big organization behind you. And that's why I kind of resources we sort of we sort of were able to focus all of the resources that were already part of the organization as well as create some new resources to provide. Yeah, coaching, training, funding, that was a big one. Funding always assessing, you know, just all that kind of stuff to help the planters be successful. That was at the end of day. That's what we did. Touch on assessing for a minute, because that's something we do as well in a business world a lot. Good. Well, you know what's interesting is the assessment tool that became very popular was actually it actually came out of the business world and it was based on behavioral interviewing. The concept of behavioral interviewing, which was my understanding, very much part of the business world, and it was kind of a whole new thing. You know that your typical ministerial interview is more about people they want to hear your heart for God and for God's calling and stuff, which is totally part of it, but

26:21 it often overlooked. What what behavioral interviewing gets to is the competencies of a person. You know, so, yeah, what element not not to say no to them but no, no, no, no, maybe, but really to talk about where the development opportunities are right exactly exactly. And the way we get at that was actually it was it was developed by this guy named doctor Charles Ridley, who was a professor at that time. I think he was at the University of Indiana. He was a believer, but he was His job at the university was to basically formulate these assessment tools for business, and as he was doing that, he thought, you know, this could have this could be applied to church because there's so many commonalities in terms of the startup things that are necessary in starting up a church that are very similar to starting up a business. And so anyway, he created he did some research and created a profile that was predictive. If you did a proper behavioral interview, you could actually predict the effectiveness of an individual before they even started based on their past behavior. And so that's something it's hard to do without skilled people leading those interviews. So I actually went and got trained how to do behavioral interviews, how to write them, how to develop them, how to interpret them, all that kind of stuff, and then we trained a whole fleet of people to do that within the denomination and within church muliplication network and so anybody that started a church for many years, and I think

27:52 to some degree it's been modified as time is gone, but that is still the one of the root things that helps. So what we wanted to do was stop sending people out on suicide missions that weren't really they just didn't have the right wiring innately, or they just weren't ready, and this helped us have an objective way to figure that out. And so I think we probably saved a lot of marriages and a lot of pain and suffering from well intended, good hearted people. And sometimes, like you said, it wasn't yes or no, it was more like not yet, or hey, go do this, you know, for the next couple of years, then come back and you probably be ready kind of stuff. So that really was helpful, all right. So following the timeline, you then founded and still lead as CEO Urban Islands Project, which to me is fascinating. So tell us about that initiative and that organization. We've got about a minute to start. We'll come back after this next break, so go ahead. Okay, So the bottom line is working as I did. You know, we started several thousand churches while I was in the leadership role, and I saw churches being started everywhere, but one of the places they weren't being started very much where it was in urban context, its like in the city centers, and that bothered me, and I wondered about it. And at first I tried to fix it from inside where I was at. I thought, I'm the leader of this big national thing. I could I can do it. But I really felt like, man, it's going to require way more focus, and so I resigned my position and jumped out of again, did another parishon and started

29:23 this this idea of Urban Islands project. And I'll tell you maybe maybe I don't know when the break's coming up, so I what I'm about to say might take more than third. We'll do it right here. Hold that thought. We're going to come right back to Urban Islands Project in about one minute. Okay, you're listening to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helenet on W four Cy Radio. That's W four cy dot com. Don't go away. More helpful information is coming right up right here on Winning Business Radio. The yp dot com website is your local search engine. If you're looking for a good restaurant, it can help you find the right one nearby with ratings and reviews.

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31:03 Yeah, so Urban Islands Project was was born out of like the first thing I did as I was in transition out of this national office. I did a little bit of I did enough research, and I've been around cities enough to figure out cities are like a thousand islands smashed together. And so you take all this stuff I've learned about the different cultures of different places, and I realized in cities you can actually have just from block to block even sometimes really really really different cultural realities. And so when for that was one of the reasons I realized that churches weren't often started in cities because you come in there and you're trying to serve a whole bunch of different kinds of people instead of realizing, way, everybody who lives in like this ten block area kind of cares about this stuff, and if you go over on the other side of some street, they're going to care about a different set of things and so, and the church needs to be aware of that. So anyway, So but I that was sort of a theory to begin with. But I just urban Islands. That's pretty good name, pretty fun, you know, so let's go with that. We called it that. We moved into Denver. We chose Denver for a bunch of different reasons, but anyway, we moved into the downtown, to the heart of Denver. I'm in the shadow of the skyscrapers in a they call it a first ring neighborhood, right outside of the central business district. And we have all the stuff that you hear about if you're not an urban person, you hear about, you know, the gunshots and the drugs and the homeless and all this stuff. It's all right here. We live in the middle of that rich and poor live right next together. That whole thing. It's just all the urban stuff.

32:36 So anyway, I felt like for me to have credibility with urban people, I had to be urban myself. That was ten years ago, so I think I'm a legit urban person now. I really understand living in the urban. But the other thing I wanted to figure out was how do you start churches? And the only way I knew to do it is just let's let's just do the best we can with what we know and get some people to be willing. So my original idea was, let's start with ten churches in the same city at the same time, like in different neighborhoods. Like. We felt like we needed to focus on the neighborhoods, not on the big city, but just on the neighborhoods as like little islands that we would start a church for each island. So our goal was to get ten. We got seven church planning teams to come into seven different neighborhoods of Denver and start basically at the same time, seven different churches in these seven different neighborhoods.

33:29 And it was fascinating the stuff we learned and that's actually what led to the book Next Wave, which we'll talk about in a minute. But anyway, long story short, we went on to I thought, this isn't going to work. If I have to live in the city every city, I can't do it. So because I wanted to scale faster than one person could do it, so we said, let's try to do it in some other cities where we don't live. So we did it in Minneapolis Saint Paul. We did it in New York City, we did it in Nashville, and each place we started clusters churches in the same city at the same time, in different neighborhoods, and from that is where the principles we discovered the principles of Next Way the twenty first century church. So transition there because I'm really curious about some of the analytics you've uncovered, some of the trends and lessons that you've learned here. Yeah, yeah, so what First of all, we've the big thing we figured out was cities, the city center especially. There's something about the collective of creatives and movers and shakers that happened around the city that make cities kind of natural cultural shapers, their cultural architects cities collectively, the people live in cities are the collective architects of culture. And so like all the whenever people think about American culture, it's kind of being born in the cities. That's where it's being born, and then it's exported out through the different It happens faster than ever because of stuff like this, but it starts in the city. So anyway, we figured out, wait, if

35:00 we can figure out what are the principles that leads to success in the city, that's going to be helpful to everybody. And we realize what's happening is the city is transitioning from a twentieth century culture to a twenty first century culture. And here's some of the principles for the church specifically, but I think it applies to any endeavor. Really you need to understand. One of them is for a church to be effective in a city, they've got to be willing to diversify their revenue stream plan. In other words, most churches start with the idea that the way that the church is going to be supported is through the giving of the people who attend the church, and that's been the gold standard of how churches are supported the problem with in a city. If you go into an underserved community, it's really hard for the income level of the folks that are living in that community to be enough to support a full time leader and a building and all the stuff you need for quote unquote a church to exist. But it's also a problem on the other end of the scale in the more upscale places, just finding a place to meet that's affordable.

36:07 It's crazy. You know, one church we worked with, it wasn't one of the ones we were helping to start, but they reached out to us, said, hey, help us figure this out. They were spending not making this out, four thousand dollars a week to rent a performance venue a neighborhood they wanted to be. It was the only place they could gather and it would only handle about one hundred and fifty people at the most. And so you do the math. I mean, it was four thousand a week just for three hours to use the space for three hours, and they had to get in, do their thing, get out, clean it up when they left every week. It was just insane. That church barely made it a year in that venue. They had to move to a different space, and they just never got the momentum they needed. So anyway, there's an economic problem now. But they were trying to do it based on this old idea that you have to have your money comes from people that are attending the church, and the math just would never work. With one hundred and fifty people. You could not come up with enough money even if they were all very wealthy to cover the costs. You have to have diversified revenue strings, which means things like co vocational in other words, the leader, the pastors, the staff. Everybody has to bring themselves somewhat. They have to have a side gig or something to support themselves. You have to do partnerships with nonprofits, partnerships and for profits. Like my favorite story of a partnership with the for profit is where this guy wanted to start a church in Minneapolis Saint Paul. And he called me up and he said, hey, I

37:40 cannot He said, I want to start a church in minnefo Saint Paul, but I cannot figure out the ROI Well, most church planners don't use that language. Yeah, yeah, I bet The answer to your question is in your story. What's your story? He says, Well, I grew up in the nation of Venezuela. I became a professional dancer. I love a dance studio, and I ended up in a chain of dance studies across the nation Eventzuela. And I said, do you know here's your there it is? He said, yeah, see, I said that you know, what are you waiting for? You know? And he goes, oh my goodness. And so he started One Reason dance studio and then six months later he started One Reason Church. And that's awesome. That created a revenue stream that provided the building for them, and then he was able to get money from other places. But that's just I mean, there's a billion examples of that.

38:30 So that's a big key thing for the future. And I think even you know, when you think about businesses and stuff like that, everybody has to be more fleet foot than we ever used to be. You know, everything keeps changing so rapidly. You can't just get stuck somewhere. Well COVID right the word it's only five letters. I write it now with a small sea just not to just not to give it the respect that it may deserve. I don't know, but do you think a tenants is going to come back? I mean, you visited us in Boston and in Canton, Massachusetts. And you know, we've noticed that, uh, those that call it home still it hasn't changed much, you know, up and down a little bit, but it hasn't changed people that come on a Sunday has in favor of online. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean COVID was definitely. I think I think I've heard someone else say this, but I'm saying it now like I said so, but I think somebody else said this first, and that is COVID really exposed some problems that church I saw, Yeah, and and so I think that COVID was it accelerated the awareness that we all have of WHOA, we got to make some changes here. So I don't I don't think that now here's if you look at what's actually happening right now. And again this is way oversimplifying, but the big trend is the big churches are gaining during following a lot of people who who left their churches during COVID are

40:02 going back to larger churches to find larger well, I mean, it depends on where you're at. In Utah largest five hundred, you know, in in Texas large as twenty thousand. So but anyway, the point is they're going to churches that can kind of provide the full uh expectation of what they have as church goers. Childcare, yeah, all that stuff, and so and so. In that in that sense, you know, people are becoming more consumeristic maybe than ever before. You know, they got they got kicked out, they don't want to. But then at the other end of the spectrum, what's interesting is so you have the bigger churches are getting bigger and the but there's more smaller churches popping up all over the place because what's happened is there's been a wave of you call them what you want, non traditional, unconventional kinds of church like well, the dance church is an example I gave you just now. But there's there's coffee house churches, there's dinner churches, there's micro churches, there's uh, there's there's networks of churches like the Tampa Underground and the Case Underground that are meeting in people's homes and stuff like that. And so in some ways you've got both the churches kind of going in two different directions. One is really more like performance oriented and and the quality is what people are looking for. The other one is more experience oriented

41:37 incarnational oriented. Neither I'm not. I think both are right. Both are fine. But what's happening is the churches in the middle are struggling. The churches the middle size, say two hundred to five hundred that used to be sort of the bread and butter of the church, it's it's becoming less. So they're either people are leaving those churches because they're not quite good enough for the consumers and they're two churchy for the people who long for something more organic and incarnational and stuff like that, and so there's a struggle. So those churches are where people are not coming back to. Is those middle ground churches is again way over simplification. But that's kind of the big picture right now.

42:19 Tough question, not sure you can answer to your best What advice would you have for that middle church? Oh, I think the answer for them is if I would say, if if they're on the cusp of being a church that can really be kind of a regional church, that's that's going to attract people from all over them, figure out what it takes to get over that hump. But for most churches in that range, I would encourage them to pivot to more of a strategy of how can we start more artists I call them artesian churches. I call them like, how can we find leaders within our congregation that have an itch about something? Again, maybe it's the guy, yeah, you know that always wanted to have a coffee shop or something. Okay, well let's go out and do the research. What's it going to take. Is there a need for coffee shop? And then start a coffee shop and a church and resource that. So I just think we have to the churches in the middle are going to have to go one direction or the other. And so my advice would be figure out which which way makes the most sense for you. And honestly, the great thing about the more organic incarnational forms of church is there's less financial risk in that direction.

43:37 You know, to go the to go to the big you're gonna have to It's it's almost like you know, starting, uh, starting a big company or something. You've got to come up with lots of capital and you know, everything got to be just right. That the margin for error is very very small in that approach, whereas starting experiments in the other direction, which is actually this is what the remage churches about. The book that we're just writing is helping churches think about how do we reimagine ourselves and start these little spin off things. And yet they're they're connected. They're not just out there completely isolated, but they're connected. I think that's where things are going to trend, and that's where things are going to go. So we've got about five minutes. I want to touch on the twelve shifts necessary for you say, for every twenty first century church. Lad I'm going to touch on a few. Feel free to jump in and mention when I may not reimagine discipleship.

44:36 I got it. I was really taken by that one. Yeah. Yeah, So people when they think of discipleship, they think about helping people who are already following Jesus follow him better, you know, grow and grow in Jesus, grow in their faith. That kind of stuff. That's become the definition discipleship. But if you look at the biblical picture of disciple making Jesus, this went out and he said to these guys fishing, he said, I want you guys to follow me, just come with me tax collector. Those guys were not well thought of because they were actually, you know, colluding with the Romans to rip off their fellow Jewish family and friends, you know, so they were not thought he invited him to come. And so there's a question I like to ask people is when do the disciples become Christians? And you know, most people go, oh, that's it.

45:27 Yeah, And the answer is, it's hard to tell because there isn't a place in the story in any of the Gospels where it clearly says and at this point they prayed the sinner's prayer or whatever you want to call it. And so the reality is making disciples starts with you interacting with somebody who's not yet following Jesus and helping them move toward Jesus. And that's what reimagining discipleship is about, is thinking about it. I call it broadband disciple making. Helping people move toward Jesus, helping people grow with Jesus. We're called to do both both of those, and that means we can make disciples of everybody in our life somehow, some shape. All right, what about rethinking team building? Yeah, yeah, So one of the challenges again this is in the context of starting new churches. Typically, what the twentieth century church plant was, let's get a really excellent worship leader and a really excellent youth pastor.

46:24 So they would build a team out of position players who are like experts in different things that the proclamational church needed the traditional church needed to be attractive to people. Well, what we're suggesting is if the disciple mak Jesus actually never said to make or to start churches, he said to make disciples. So if disciples is what we're called to do, then what you actually want to start a church with is people who are just as they do life, they're making disciples of people around them. And so that's the rethinking team building. Instead of going out and finding the best position players, you go out and find people who are disciple makers as they do life and invite them onto your team so that that community of disciples can grow so really relational in their heart, absolutely so. And that's and that's the contrast because a lot of times, like the worship leaders like hold up somewhere, you know, singing songs for themselves. Yeah, in the green room, but you want people who are out there, you know, connected. Yep, all right, last one we have time for We talked about this just slightly, but refresh the metrics. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, So the big the big thing. You know most churches when when people say, hey, how's it going? Oh good? In fact, I've been saying this all day, like we ran this many, we ran two hundred, five hundred thousand, two thousand whatever. We identify the church by how many people show up on Sunday to hear the pastor preach. I mean, oversimplifying it, and that's the metric you use. Well, the problem with that metric is it's like it's almost I compare that to you being in a car it's going eighty miles

47:58 an hour because the only two gauges that you can see are how fast are we going and how much gas does they tank? The spinometer says we're going eighty, the gas tank says it's full. Sounds like everything's great, But the rest of the story is you're going downhill. You have no brakes on your head for a cliff. Okay, those two gauges are not giving you all the information you need to know if that car is healthier or not. The engine fell out. You know you're going eighty miles an hour, but it has no engine. So my point is just saying, well, we have two thousand people doesn't mean it's a healthy church. So we have to have other metrics, and so some of those would be what we just talked about, like how many disciples are being made is one question. We actually had one of our churches here in Denver, they started measuring their effectiveness by how many keys to their neighbors' homes they had because the neighbors had given them their key because they trusted us, Yes, and that was actually a tangible expression of trust. And they said, we want that to be how we're known in this community, in this neighborhood. So that's a that's an example of a different kind of metry. There is so much more. Wish we had time. It's been really awesome having you here, Steve. Thank you so much and are you really busy? I appreciate your time. Thanks Kevin.

49:13 This has been an honor, uh one. If you put on the Crawl one more time, hope people can reach out. The new Time book book comes out when, Uh, that's a good question. Eminently within the Yeah, they haven't given us a date yet, but it's it's going to be out in the next couple of months. Here cool, and they can purchase the older books or the I hate to say the older books the first books at next to your site community nexwaves dot community, or you can go to Amazon and all that. Yeah, okay, it's it's available there. Excellent. Thank you so much, spin Asco you, thank you, welcome and thanks everybody for watching and for listening. This is a show about business and business challenges, a little different spin today, but hope you see the parallels. If you've got concerns about the growth of your company, feel free to reach out to me on Facebook or LinkedIn at Winning Business Radio, where you can drop me a note. One of my many email addresses is Kevin at Winning Business Radio dot com. Our company is Winning Incorporated. We're part of Sandler Training. We develop sales teams into high achievers and sales leaders into true coaches and mentors. Listen, We're not right for everybody, but hey, maybe we should have a conversation. Thank you to producer and engineer one.

50:20 Appreciate you on for another job well done. Be sure to join us next week. That's Monday, July fifteenth. We're gonna do it all over again. Until then, this is Kevin Hallanan. Thank you. You've been listening to Winning Business Radio with your host, Kevin Helen. If you missed any part of this episode, the podcast is available on Talk for Podcasting and iHeartRadio. For more information and questions, go to Winning Business Radio dot com or check us out on social media. Tune in again next week and every Monday at four pm Eastern Time to listen live to Winning Business Radio on W four Cyradio W fourcy dot com. Until then, let's see see where others have failed and win in business with Kevin Helenan and Winning Business Radio h