William Vanderbloemen on Why 2021 Will Be the Year So Many People Quit

[Music] welcome to the carrie new hoff leadership podcast on youtube my name is carrie newhof and my goal is to help you lead like never before so what i do every week is i sit down with world class leaders and church leaders business leaders and i talked to them about what made them who they are and try to have the conversation with them that you would have if you got to sit down for lunch with them or have dinner with them or really got to spend some time with them so we go into the back story and we explore what made them who they are and some of the principles they've learned along the way so if you enjoy this episode i would love for you to like it to subscribe and also to share it with your friends and in the meantime here's today's episode well william welcome back to the podcast it's just great to have you good to be here my friend we have talked a lot this year back and forth texting big green egg stuff all that but you've done the reverse of what most people did you look like you've dropped a few pounds uh during covid so tell us about that was this a journey to health for you or like what happened not that you needed to not that you needed 2 william i probably did need to i've always liked working out and that's been good but you know carrie you get into this job where uh i started this 12 years ago now 12 and a half something like that and wow i'm going to memphis i've never been to memphis i've got to go to the place with the good ribs wow i'm in you know baltimore they have cr crabs here i need to go make sure i have plate of that and like you know i gained a ton of weight the very first year out of the gate and i always work out and try and be pretty careful but but uh when this code thing happened uh adrian and i just looked at each other and we were like this is gonna go one way or the other and we're either gonna gain the 19 or lose it and uh i think combination of not traveling and she cooks really clean and and doing a little more working out you know i i did hit one of those round number birthdays last year that probably kicked me in my butt a little bit and you know random trivia you know well researched on the internet as all things are these days but apparently if you look at people who run marathons people whose birth year like their age ends in nine are over represented in other words at 39 it's like okay well i'm in my 30s i'm going gonna run this triathlon or this marathon or whatever and uh i thought that was interesting so of course you took three of that part of that is because at the uh round years so i turned 50 and i should have gotten in shape at 49 because your your time you run when you're 49 can count toward qualifying for boston at the 50 age group so you you get to count the times for qualifying but uh i didn't do that so i'm just uh there you go i hit like i didn't lose weight but i didn't gain weight so i figured that that was good and then i hit some personal bests on strava this year so that was fun more personal best this year than the last five years combined so i'll tell you what weight aside i have started to live out one of our uh core values a little bit more this one of our values at our company is ever increasing agility and i i have said for years the example is um you know when i was early 40s i was running and i finally needed to start stretching and so i'm stinking spot it's true oh it's terrible and and the stretching was more painful and i sweat more during that than the run and i remember trying to touch my toes one day and our youngest macy was probably two or three at the time she walked into the room and uh she saw me just sweating trying to touch my toes and she just kind of sized me up up and down came beside me and as only a toddler can do tied herself in this human pretzel you know because and and then stood up and looked at me again and laughed at me and left the room not one word said and and it dawned on me i'm just sitting in our question list sorry but it dawned on me on that day hey william every day i'm alive i get less flexible yep biological fact it's a company fact it's a church fact it's just so i've said that and stretched some and all that but back in january before covid i um officially retired from the sport of banana boating we were we're on a lake in a warm climate with some friends on a banana boat and i was getting off and a wave came in and pulled the boat up and my leg went one way and i pulled my hamstring and it it's the first time i've been injured where i couldn't like i couldn't fix it so i've been doing a lot of stretching and trying to do a little bit of yoga here and there and and that's not something that's helped with weight but man do i feel better being more flexible isn't that great yeah i finally got into stretching a few years ago and uh not serious but like oh on the days i do it i feel a lot better speaking of what is it ever increasing agility is one of your company values so you and i were talking before we started recording i mean i've had to pivot you've had to pivot everybody has done this but what's that meant for vanderbloom and associates like for your company what does that mean when because you did rely a lot of in-person in-person searches meetings flying around the country you and your whole team so how did how did that hit you and what did you do yeah well i mean god is so good he he sees ahead right and uh we had been finally so i'm a horrible manager i mean i'm really bad the way the onboarding model when we were a younger company and fewer people oh here's how you learn how to do search follow william around for six months like that was it osmosis right osmosis yeah so now i've got people that are smart enough that they built systems and strategies and i guess the way you're supposed to say it is our the way we do things can be taught and doesn't have to be caught right right right so that's a beautiful spot so all the way back beginning of 18 we started putting in motion a plan to decentralize our offices not not totally virtual but to say all right let's start setting up regional offices in areas of the country in the world where we do most of our work so we start doing that we start looking for a different and and we start setting up all right that means we're gonna have to get used to doing a lot of virtual we've done zoom forever but let's get really good at it let's build backdrops so that no matter where you are it's going to look the same as we had all these virtual backdrops and we had zoom cameras and we were all ready to go and then when covet hit it was like wow we thought we were doing this for one reason and god was preparing us for and we pretty much just flipped the switch and uh you know went virtual during the lockdown period um i guess from march i guess we came back to the office in late july okay yeah and and uh you know we can go back to if we had to go back to totally virtual we could and you know the way the numbers as we're recording now are going maybe that's something that'll have to happen but that doesn't really scare us i i i think on a business front uh one real outcome of the word of the covid incident is pivot is now a four-letter word at our office we're so tired of hearing that word like give me a break can we find another word uh but uh in seriousness though um i don't know that we relied on in-person worship um but we did rely on people hiring and you know most churches are doing pretty well despite what most churches that use us despite what a lot of press would say there's a lot more good news than bad but people hunkered down like how's this going to go what are we going to do we're not really going to hire i'm not really going to move right now and it just kind of went into shutdown and we knew that and you and i've talked we read that article that uh was just not really a great bedtime story that andy crouch wrote you know leading on the night yeah [Music] yeah i read it right before bed that was bad you didn't sleep well that night yeah no not at all but but but we did adopt the okay this is going to be a while so you know we shored up cash we took advantage of ppp uh loans the government was making and then we said how can we we're not going to be doing a search for a little bit so how can we serve churches right so that you know on the doomsday side if we die we die serving right and if we pull through this then we will have served churches and done the right thing during a hard time and and god will smile on that and uh so we we pivoted into helping churches with their ppp loans we helped with a number of how do you get virtual how do you reopen we started enormous leadership uh content initiatives that that went forward with schools with non-profits with churches and uh spent the summer doing that and and you know our january and our february were our best january and february ever in terms of new uh clients or searches or chances to serve and then march was like off march of march of 2020 i shouldn't say this out loud oh march of 2020 was 96 worse than march of 2019 wow that's pretty bad that's bad yeah it's like that's a bad month then you're not sleeping yeah yeah yeah yeah you if you brought in a hundred dollars then the next march you brought in four so you know a little bit different uh so and and we were you know we we don't have any debt we don't have any investors we've you know kept powder dry so that's fine you know this is why you have a rainy day account but but we've been excited to see really since the summer even with very slow and modest reopening of churches and schools uh we're we're seeing real traction and we're now seeing you know better a better 2020 right now than we had this time 2019. so i i very thankful for our team that has pitched in uh we all did something you know right out of the gate we had to restructure and all of our lead team said okay we'll take salary cut i said no more pay for me for the year let's just do what we have to to to pull through and they've really done a great job and uh i'm on top of what our team has done i'm very encouraged about where schools nonprofits and the church sit right now as we head toward 21. yeah what would you there was a lot there but one of the the questions that i have coming out of that is search is kind of resumed and you're doing a few more zoom interviews and virtual meetings than perhaps you did before have you and these are early days so we're recording this in november of 2020 but we got six months under our belt in this disrupted world have you seen who churches or organizations are hiring shift like is it the same positions that you've seen or have you seen like i would think are there more digital positions open like what are the most in demand positions heading into 2021 that you're seeing well a lot has shifted and a lot has changed and during this time where we couldn't really do search for a while we went ahead and built some things that we've been meaning to do for a long time that or they call it quadrant two time you know that not not urgent but super important and one of those things we built a sister company to help with uh sort of staff support roles uh because i think what we're gonna see so so here's the big idea that i'd share with listeners right now i'm telling business leaders church leaders school leaders everywhere 2021 is going to be the year of turnover which is going to be and we can we can unpack that if you want but i do want to unpack that totally if you think i'm wrong then go ahead and fool yourself and say well this pandemic will only last two weeks you were listening you will lose someone next year that you don't see coming wow and i'm not just using that line to play into carrie's book which is no it's a great line and thank you you will you will i i've got a pastor friend who says every pastor should keep a vomit list like what is that i said it's a very short list of the two or three staff people that if they walked in at the end of the day and said can i have 10 minutes to visit with you which is never good yeah right you just reach for the trash can and say let me throw up first well here my prediction is there gonna be a lot of people reaching for the trashcan this next year because turnover is coming okay let's unpack that why how what does that look like like like explain that right well there's there's a few reasons and we can get back to uh this other company as an outflow of that but but the the well for starters people change jobs that's just the way it is i mean every pastor is an interim pastor every business leaders and his interim business leader every superintendent interim superintendent and moving around is not a bad thing you know if you if you read the gospels it's hilarious to hear what jesus got in trouble with with his own followers and like the most common complaint i can find where the guys are mad at him it's like dude can you not sit still because he says no i've got to go from village to village i've got to keep moving and then use them they can't find them they lose them you not stay in one place for 20 minutes yeah exactly so that happens so churn just happens right well guess what in 2020 it didn't right so there's latency in the system there's a lot in the system here's churn as a river right and 2020 just put a dam up and like people like youth ministry if you're if you're a pastor listening every pastor's had this happen the the monday after easter the youth pastor walks in and says i'm leaving i want to stay until graduation until we sing friends or friends forever or whatever the new version of that is and then i'm out and you're off to the races like well none of that happened everybody's like i can't leave them now right or i can't even leave my city now or so much for that yeah or or another factor i'm not about to inject any extra uncertainty into my life right now so you've got people stayed put out of loyalty you've got people who didn't move because they didn't want to inject uncertainty into a totally uncertain year you've also got a couple other things you know interesting we've had a few re searches that we're doing right now that are a result of uh in fact one that will be starting tomorrow for a client where we had placed the worship pastor he'd stayed five years he's leaving and they called us and said hey we want you to come do it again this was great well why is he leaving well this whole pandemic has made them realize they want to live near their family yes and so you've got people like bugging out for lots of different like i want to go be near my family i didn't leave when i should have think about this have you ever had anybody on your staff this happens in business or church where you give them a sabbatical right and they go take sabbatical or maybe you've heard of a friend that had a sabbatical they come back from sabbatical within a year they're gone from their job yep almost what there must be a percentage behind that because that is that is like really high it happens all the time businesses are smarter than churches they put gold in handcuffs if we're giving you the sabbatical you're staying this long or you owe us money churches haven't gotten that shrewd yet but but why is that well it's not a bad thing you know we're creatures of habit we get into a rut of doing things the same way all the time sabbaticals get us out of the rut and we're able to look around and we're able to go to the mountain and be with the lord and hear a fresh word or understand that life is short and we want to get on with it you know i 2020 has been the longest sabbatical ever now i know there are pastors right now leaders right now saying what is battle for me i've been working my tail off yeah but not in your normal routine yep this has pulled everyone out of their normal routine for you say five months i've it's been a while and and it'll probably be a while yeah i think people are looking at summer 2021 before there's any semblance now there's talk of vaccine is that going to happen but but one of the stories that has happened here i've not tracked the stories closely in the u.s you're houston based i'm toronto based but um there's been a geographic redistribution so i live an hour north of toronto and like housing prices here are through the roof because people are going i don't have need to live downtown in a condo when when i can have a 60-foot lot or a half-acre here for less money i'm gonna move up here and so you see new york like i had scott harrison on the podcast earlier this year he left tribeca and went into rural pennsylvania and you see that as some of the tech companies decentralized so is that going to be part of it too uh where people are just like yeah we want to go live in the mountains we don't have to live on the coast anymore totally agree you know we're doing some uh search work right now in park city utah and you can't get somebody in a home there like there aren't homes because it's close enough to a good airport but not in the middle of all the mess and you know we're seeing it in rye new york and in greenwich connecticut all the places that were where don and betty draper would have lived right but then everybody millennial went into tribeca or to chelsea or some place cool in new york and now they're headed back out so i we could go with six or seven more really critical reasons but i promise you 21 is going to be the year of turnover and so this year we've been preparing for that it's going to be a storm surge hey here's another factor i cannot tell you how many guys and gals but guys predominantly who were thinking you know sometime in the next five years i'm going to talk about succession well guess what covet accelerated i don't want to reconstruct this right like well you know what or i just didn't sign up for this and they really need a digital native and i'm not you know and and it's time to speed this up and get the next person in they can so they're just so many reasons why we foresee 21 as a year where there's gonna be a lot of turnover and some of it's gonna be really painful i mean you know imagine your very best person walking in in the middle of covet and saying william i know we've been together nine years but i want to start my own marketing company yeah that happened happened to me and and uh it's holly who you know well and she's gonna kill it she's gonna do a great job and i'm cheering her on and so glad for the time we had with her that was your vomit bucket moment right like holly's great it was she even brought it up when she called me she said so you know that vomit thing you talk about i'm like yeah okay i get it i'm triggering but she's nothing but great things to say about her but i think the sitting still and all the disruption was a real catalyst in her heart for now's the time to give let's go ahead and do it and i just if you're not getting ready for turnover then you're going to be in for some surprises in the next year yeah it's really interesting it's almost as and at some point it's not going to happen soon but at some point the external disruption is going to normalize that's right but then that will fuel a whole bunch of internal disruption where people go now i have permission to move now i have permission and on the whole succession thing you know it's interesting because i'm on year five of a five-year plan succession where i'm off church staff at the end of 2020 but part of me literally as i'm wrapping up as we record this interview i'm like i know this was all premeditated and we worked on this and pre-planned and the plan's gone beautifully but i'm like yeah it is a weird time to leave and yet i was thinking if i was still the founding pastor at 55 in the lead pastor seat i'd be thinking am i really going to do this for the next five years like maybe maybe i will maybe i won't so it just raises questions that um normal situations don't um back to that question about like um an increase in jobs like do you find more organizations you serve churches and not-for-profits and educational facilities are they looking for tech people are they looking for online social media people yeah you and i have had a friendly debate throughout this whole thing i i just is a bit of a debate yeah it's it's it's great i mean you know love it but i am convinced in person will not go away i do think and i agree with that uh i i i kid people all the time i was talking to the houston chronicle yesterday our newspaper and they were asking about in person versus not and why not say hey look christmas is coming um we really believe that jesus came to earth in person for a reason and and we're told in the bible that that was the fullness of time right so if this were the fullness of time jesus would have just zoomed it in but there's something about in person that really matters now what's different well the in-person person has to also be digitally native i mean like the preacher has to be able to preach to a camera and to a room right um the the pastor why are people going to come back in person it's not gonna be because because of our sermons forget that yeah content is everywhere it's ubiquitous yeah i mean it's gonna be because they want to see friends and they want to be around people so that there's a need for digital natives that's coming but there's also a need nobody's talking about this yet there's a real need i i don't know if you're familiar with the old uh uh there's a threefold office of christ in the reformed tradition and and the actual king prophet priest and king and a lot of people talk about pastors in that role like the prophetic visionary gift the the kingly run the organization gift and the priestly take care of people gift there's a huge surge coming in a need for people with a priestly gift yeah because the other two are going to go out you're going to be able to outsource a lot of running of things that used to not be able to be outsourced uh the prophetic i mean yeah it'd be great if you could preach well but people can youtube anything now and they know it so like the ability to really care for people and to hyper contextualize your ministry around the the postal code you're in not just the the area of the country like that's going to be key so so a couple different fronts tech positions yes yeah and like think about education for a minute in the united states there's been a pretty uh a pretty raging debate like in seminary i went to princeton it's still three years residential only you gotta go to the ivory tower you gotta live there which you know the average age of a seminarian now is like 35 so does that make sense to pick up a family and and along comes liberty that has done an amazing job with a lot of pure online you know degrees well which one is right and they've been fighting with each other forever well guess what now they both have to be both and the and the princeton guys can no longer just say ivory tower they have to be able to do both in the in the sec in the undergraduate world harvard's always said well we're harvard more ivy league and university of phoenix is hilarious they have a football stadium named after them and they don't have a football team like so you know they they're totally virtual now people running schools and seminaries have to be able to think both ways so you see people like al mohler at southern seminary doing an amazing job because he's been beating the drama of digital forever and residential it's it's like it's like churches and schools and non-profits are looking for dual citizens it's not an either or it's a can you be digitally native and still be so here in person and in the flesh yeah and that may not have gotten to the question that you know it's a great question and you know on the on the priestly thing the other place i have heard that um i did a two and a half hour interview with gordon mcdonald which was unbelievable what's that isn't he the best he is the best and one of his insights at turning 80 the view from 80 was that we need more priests and fewer preachers and we just spent like 10 minutes on it but that would be worth looking at that because there is like i always think nobody can out local the local church right like you shouldn't be able like yeah maybe i can't compete with the best communicators in the world right now but i got people around me that those communicators are not going to come and visit so nobody should be able to out local the local church so i see that on the other hand everybody you want to reach is online and so it's that hybrid world that digital world and i agree with you you know one this isn't a church trends episode but one of the things i think is in person isn't going away it just won't always be in the facility that maybe you're going to be gathering people in your homes and the church will equip you for that around the community and you know the old the old saying billy graham said the way i prepare for a message is i sit down at a table with bible in one hand and a newspaper in another i listen to me pastor that's gold sit down with the bible in your hand and not a newspaper your most local news i've got a dear friend who's a pastor here in town who's been worried since about april like no one's ever going to come back to our church well why well because they've found they can listen to steve furtick now and they can listen to matt chandler and why would they come listen to me and i've just said let's call him john i said john you know what you have that none of them have you have a call to your local parish so the local parish priest the local parish you know parson that like that's gonna be so key and if you think about it it's been coming i mean we used to have giant malls and then it went to strip malls and now it's local farm to market tables well the same thing's gonna happen with talent it's like can you speak to here now in this small moment of our smallest part of the world i i i just see it being a huge deal and not just the the preaching but but the showing up like paying the old school rent of actually doing hospital visits whenever we're allowed to do that i i was listening to tim keller who i mean if there is one author that we will still read in a hundred years if jesus doesn't come back before then like he's our guy he's our c.s lewis feeds me every time i listen to him he actually taught me preaching at reform seminary preaching to the postmodern world it was a great class and and he was telling a story of going back to his church that he served in virginia before he moved to new york he went there i mean he hadn't been there in 30 years and they had him back and you know all these people showed up and they were asked to share a memory of something that is still in their heart of tim's time there and he said it was just one of the nicest things anyone's ever done for him it was amazing to hear the stories and as he heard the stories he realized you know no one has said a word about my preaching [Music] like so i i just think that old school stuff is what people are going to be looking for in their talent in the coming years and digitally native at the same time makes for a whole new makes for a whole new kind of support staff that's why we started this sister company christian teams i mean in the u.s before the pandemic most estimates that i read said about 10 of protestant churches were streaming their services weekly online yeah now about 10 of protestant churches in the us are not correct so you i mean that's a massive move right so like having this guy from student ministries that's in 10th grade as a reliable source for getting things streaming that just doesn't happen so so these support staff roles that are not executive level they're they're going to be huge and there's going to be a lot of turnover in those too so we we're like okay we're going to have to help if nothing else on the tech and the online streaming which is not an executive search role i mean it's probably a forty thousand dollar role so we built a whole new company and a whole new system to try and help that and that's christian teams yeah that's christianteams.com i know that sounds like a commercial it is to some extent but but it is an answer to your question of what are we seeing coming out of this that's going to be a new reality and uh with i think turnover in general but not just at the top level also at this support level and and if the top is the head of an organization uh the support staff is the spine and and you can't get by without it yeah i'm curious you know and we do see things a little bit differently which is one of the things that makes our friendship so much fun and interesting and so many common interests cycling and big green egg and all that stuff but you know i've been thinking about this a lot one of the last things i did when i was lead pastor at connexus was lead the building project and then one of my first things in my founding teaching role was we launched online in 2016. and we had a good online presence but like most churches it was like uh and other duties when it came to the service programming person it's like yeah just make sure that whole like website and the stream happens and the youtube thing gets built and all that so it was good you know we would have hundreds or thousands of views but not not what we have today and so we were kind of ready when the pandemic hit because it was okay we can't mean person but we do have this investment in gear and yeah we needed some upgrades but it was a pretty easy switch but i'm thinking and then you know these days i run a virtual company and have for five years you know in the podcast in the communications company but um i'm thinking you know from a staffing perspective i wouldn't be surprised if you see a lot of churches like i'm looking for a percentage of what you think um growing thriving churches will be pumping into digital in other words rather than the and other duties as maybe a signed line in your creative guys profile or the student pastor's profile could you see 20 of church staffing going into uh online support 40 50 like any any thoughts on that where do you think that might land in a few years i'd love to give you the quotable number that you can tweet and make lovely i don't i don't know the number um it'll be a bajillion times more than it is now there that's not there you can tweet that yeah and i'll tell you what i'm already seeing it even in larger churches that were already ready like yours um instead of getting asked to do a worship pastor or a production person like a nancy beach used to be at willow like now it's like no actually the person above them now is the communication director right the worship pastor is now going to report to and i've said this for years the chief communications officer is the is the growing edge of the c-suite in non-profits schools churches you name it that that communication because if we've learned anything through this pandemic you've got to communicate and over communicate and over communicate and you got to do it through so many different channels so i'm already seeing that so that's toward a bajillion yeah and then i'm seeing churches like my mother's church and she she doesn't like it when i refer to her i'm from north carolina from western north carolina and really a beautiful lovely part of the town in case my mother's list in case my mother's listing is wonderful setting up but it's pretty deep in the woods and uh you know it's it's it's near where they filmed deliverance so no lie uh great people good culture sorry mom but you know it is what it is and so she's got a brand new pastor who started like in january poor guys oh yeah yeah yeah i've had a meltdown here's your job description yes twice now he's he's wonderful but man he just walked into a mess and i've just said so many times this year if john had come to his board of elders and said i've got a brilliant idea why don't we stream all of our services online every week from now on they would have laughed him out of the room yep they would have said forget it and when you ask him what he did with the pen well that's what we did well how'd you do it well my wife has a camera and my kids held the mic like it was like it is so duct tape paper clips right now and now churches are waking up saying okay this is no this is not going away like yeah even when life is normal this is not going away whether the digital serves the in person or the other way around they're both gonna be there it's like our friend craig grishall says i'm putting all my eggs in both baskets yes yeah we've had that conversation and he's like we're going 100 on digital and 100 on in person and exactly exactly and and and i mean resources like life church of course you can do that you know which is great i think that's amazing but like i can almost can you see a world because i'm i'm thinking about this like there was sort of the lead pastor who was also the lead communicator and now the communication thing because it's so complicated with multiple inboxes and streams and social you have a communication person but i can almost see digital arts being over worship arts or creative arts you know where that that digital thing where the weekend experience becomes an expression of your ministry but it isn't the ministry do you see it differently do you see it the same way no absolutely the same way in a large church like yours or or your former church or whenever this airs oh we're not leaving we just i'm just not getting paid anymore so you know here's the news they're they're going to see you as former sorry yeah i know it's succession one of my mentors has said listen and they forget you pretty fast yes he's right yes and its place knows it no more isn't that what we're all about yeah so um you know on a on a large church scale like connexus i think you're gonna see the executive team change drastically yeah i think the worship pastor being in the room maybe because you don't want to cut them out but there'll be a new ad it'll be the i.t director it'll be the chief communications officer on a scale of my mother's church where they have a couple hundred people on them which is still a big church in the u.s but a couple hundred people on the weekend uh you're gonna see you might not see a full-time tech person you might see that forty thousand dollar higher but what i think you will see is when we add that associate pastor who really is other duties is necessary one of the lead indicators of core competency is going to be digitally native can they oversee the outsourced labor that we have and make sure that that all these high schoolers were paying or or one-offs that we're contracting to are actually following consistent to our belief system and our messaging and our so it's just gonna hit every church everywhere it'll manifest itself differently based on size of staff and and such but yeah totally agree with you yeah and i'm thinking about that even at the church and then where where you know i'm we still go there it's still our church it's been a great great relationship but i'm thinking of this on my team too so i tend to work with leaders who are decades younger than me and there is a digital native component to that do you think that some of the church staff because most you know barna's stats your stats i saw it in your latest edition of next your succession book the average pastor is 57 ish so i am still younger than the average pastor but i'm not a digital native i have a long pre-digital memory i remember what it's like to be a teenager and not have a phone or have to get up and change the channels rather than have a remote like i remember all that stuff and i think the church probably skews a little bit older in staff i have always hired younger and i find that even if your job isn't digital it's just not hard for them and do you think that we will end up with a younger staff moving forward just because of the digital native um component to it well one one great hope i have for this and i i am uh chronically looking for silver linings in the middle of very dark you're an optimist yeah so you know i mean this glass is going to stay half full no matter how much i drink out of it but i one of my great hopes and beliefs is you know the church has been everybody what's the famous line and we we have a diversity practice and we keep saying the church is one the the most segregated place in america is 11. yeah right i think dr king might have been the first person to say it but it's not just race it's it's demographic too it's age and i'd like to think that you know the skinny jean people and the still wear coat and thai people will actually be forced to have to coexist a little bit more because of pandemic i mean i don't know how to do this you know cross mentor me or make this work all i know is a legal pad help it be digital and then digital people are going to be craving more permanence than they had before 2020. so i'm hopeful that there'll be some more co-mingling of generations in churches yeah yeah i know that would be a that would be a good thing and and i would just say to leaders like older gen x or boomers and i mean i've got the iphone 12 and the whole deal so it's not like i'm i'm and you too william you know you're not you you like have all the latest gear and that kind of thing but there's a difference when you started using it when you're 10 than when you started using it when you're 30. there's just there's a wiring there's an innate mindset we're going to go a lot harder on video in 2021 and i'm like there my team is telling me so we're going to create a channel and we're going to do this and you're going to create a show and i'm like what does that involve and they're like don't even worry about it just get in front of the camera film something we'll take care of it and i think you'll see a lot more of that in church let's talk about succession a little bit this is something i've been really passionate about it's why i went early rather than later i i stepped out at 50 which a lot of people were like you know wow that's early that's young glad i did it i think it was the right move for the church the right move for me um are we running into a place where that is going to be even more of a crisis moving forward or do you see that situation getting better what's your take on succession in the church and i would say for business leaders too i i think i i think this is actual statistics from like harvard studies but like 95 95 of all businesses don't really have a meaningful succession plan like it's not like businesses have done this better systematically than churches this is a human problem right well there's there's a whole lot there to unpack carrie i i think when i sat down with warren bird six six and a half years ago to frame out a book on pastoral succession after my mother called me saying you're gonna do what i mean she thought she's gonna have to buy all 20 copies of the book uh you know my whole goal in writing that book was to say hey let's let's change this from a dirty conversation we can't have to one that we can actually let's move it from the parking lot to the board room like let's actually and that's happening so there is a conversation happening now that's that is so encouraging to me i i've been asked to come into some rooms that i would never been asked to come into before to say how are we going to talk about succession and people you know there's a saying in the catholic church the only sick pope is a dead pope you know we just don't talk about transition like we're not going to do that and uh you know here we are after the book came out there's a pastoral succession with a living pope in rome that's amazing so the conversation's happening covet has accelerated it and i where i see this taking root now the largest companies in the u.s almost always have to have a succession plan there's there's actually congressional acts for publicly traded companies that you must do this but the reality is most of american businesses are not corporate they're not publicly traded they're like you know small five six figures small seven figure businesses that are privately announced and i'll tell you what we're focusing on so much right now is how do you do succession in a family business because that's where most businesses are yeah and you know what does that actually look like and i'll tell you what within parts of the church it's the same thing yes um particularly my friends that are in the more spirit-filled or charismatic like it's just almost a given that it's kind of a family business and it's going to go from the father to the son well you know the chance of a business going from one generation to the next or a church or a school or what have you very very slim that it works you get the third generation it's like ten percent you had the fifth generation uh like smuckers is a fifth generation family owned comp or family run company it's publicly traded now there's no research the only other company that is out there is nordstrom and so so like it doesn't matter where you are there's a need for this conversation to get real and to study what does this look like covet i think has accelerated some people's plans about succession whether it's i'm not digitally native or life's too short i want to do something else or i've been putting this off and okay let's go ahead and do it you know there's a or the world is changing it's not going back to normal and i didn't sign up for this there's there's an acceleration that's happened with succession uh it's it's god has such a sense of humor we did an updated and expanded version of our book it's called next pastoral succession that works yeah it's hefty man it's weighty like it's a it's a real book like yeah well yeah lots of research yeah well and i think we did 500 case studies 200 in-depth the first round and then went through five or six printings i mean this is not like a a book you'd write this is a soup they call it a micro niche book right but it blew through every expectation for sales so they said would you come back and do another version of this with some new research so we put a 150 new pages of research in there and uh what we're finding is the conversation's happening it's going to happen quicker and it's going to be more urgent than ever before some of that not to go too long with an answer some of that is because there will be a talent shortage and that that has nothing to do i did not just call young pastors untalented that's not okay so here's what i mean uh let's let's do a chart okay lots of available candidates no available candidates right lots none let's talk about age going this way baby boomers millennials okay there are lots of baby boomers that are about to retire they're not many people that are 35 to 55 to take over there are lots of millennials that are under 35 ready to work but most churches are not going to hand a senior pastor it over to somebody under 35 they're just not going to do it so whether it's a church or business or a non-profit or a school i you know you're probably if you're looking at a succession where we're talking about retirement you're probably looking at getting in a knife fight with five of your friends over who gets the 40 year old i mean that's just that is the way it's going to go now the the other piece that i would i would say we wrote to two people when we wrote the book one is the average mega church pastor is like 61 or 2 right now in the u.s so it's a little bit older and that's primary audience like okay this is on the horizon really interesting we're starting to get uh organizations hire us for a 10-year succession consultation wow we're going to talk about this now because carrie's turning 45 and he's going to be done when he's 50 10-year conversation the second audience we're writing to is the pastor who's 30 who may only stay at his place eight ten years i mean career change you know this studying millennials and gen z like staying in one spot long enough to get the gold watch or whatever churches give out it's just not happening anymore so it's not just a retirement conversation you know it's it's a legacy conversation no matter what stage career you're in wow and um i'd love to know because i feel like this is a question you know as a pastor uh i i always get asked if god is so good why is there suffering and i feel like um you could have just preached your best 40 minute message on that ever and someone would greet you at the door and go well that was great but yeah honestly william if god is so good why is there suffering right it's like the inexhaustible question so one of the questions that i do have that feels inexhaustible is why do so because i talk to a lot of young leaders like you do and it's like it is hard to have the conversation this guy is holding on he's been phoning it in for five years or ten years why do so many leaders not saying all but why do so many leaders hang on for so long william if i knew the answer to that i'd write a book about it carrie i got a i got a uh a couple of hypotheses or guesses uh one is um you know we're pretty far removed from this illustration so a lot of people won't understand it but i call this hanging on too long thing the brett favre syndrome so you fall football in the u.s brett favre one of the most decorated quarterbacks ever he stayed too long and he kept bouncing from team to team season is too long oh yeah and you go why is that well okay whatever god put in brett favre that allowed him to stand in the pocket while giant men are running at him that want to tear his head off and stand there and make decisions and believe in himself and believe he could do it and zip the ball down the field and lead a team while all that's going on that's amazing i mean who has that kind of gifting the flip side to that there's you know every weakness is just a shadow side of your greatest strength and and the the shadow side of that strength is the voice that whispers in brett's here saying you can do it one more year yeah so all right what's the number one fear in the world that humans have it's public speaking like over and over and over and jerry seinfeld is the one who said you know people would rather be the subject of a funeral than the speaker at the funeral [Laughter] so what is it that god puts in a woman or a man that allows them not just to publicly speak but to do it every week and not just to do a speech every week but to say here's what the creator of the universe says about your life i mean like what is that that god puts in that person well i can tell you what shadow side is side is the the part that says you you could stay one more here yeah and i had a friend carrie who the church i pastored here in houston had a whole lot of corporate leaders and i remember one one guy who came in my office one day his name was doug and he was a ceo of a very large company and he was considering moving to a ceo role of another company and he wanted my advice i'm like i'm 31 32 what do you like but i thought i knew everything so it was fine and uh i said what are you concerned about and he said william have you never heard the old saying the first day you're the ceo is the last day you hear the truth and i'm still wrapping my mind around that and i still have to remind myself every day my staff might tell me i'm doing a great job but they're not telling me the truth because you can hire them you can fire them you hold all the power yeah they might even think they're telling me the truth but they're not so pastor you did so good this sunday and the church is doing well you can hear that and not even realize people are not telling you the truth i think it's why succession for the priesthood is the only time retirement's mentioned in the bible and it's mandated it's got to happen yeah do you think some of it um is financial as well that i just need to work because they opted out of social security and like i gotta i go listen i get it but william i just need five more years man then i can retire what would you say to that leader well i'd say you're not alone you're not alone at all and i have worked with some of the largest most successful churches in the country and you'd be shocked how close uh how closely the pastor lives hand-to-mouth right despite all stereotypes and i mean carrie we could spend hours unpacking why that that's not pastors or bad managers there's i mean there's just a lot of reasons underneath that okay but it's a reality so you're not alone if that's who you are secondly if you're honest with your church they'll fix it i promise you they will i i can't tell you the number of times in the last three years that i've sat down with the board and like you know to make this right you're going to need to pay carry this on an accelerated basis so that we can get the succession done and you know what those business majors look at me and say they say absolutely and i i i reside right well i have and it's not because they love you i mean maybe they love you that's great they just want you out they know what's investment no no that's not it no no no no the most expensive thing you can do in a succession is screw it up i mean that's like it you look at the churches that have just gone no that were the biggest church and they have bad succession and they lose revenue and they lose vision and they lose people and they lose and they lose lose lose lose and they lose time and momentum and you know i have it in my hip pocket to say to the board i know it sounds like a lot of money to pay you know in deferred compensation but it's less expensive than i don't even have to finish the sentence the business women and men in the in the room say it's less expensive than this going bad yeah and that's not a that's not a retirement issue that's a money issue and that's what i when leaders ask me i'm like that's that's just something you handle financially and the pastor is probably relieved um along the way so kerry if you're listen if you're listening to this and you're a 35 year old pastor y'all are doing budgets right now probably even if you don't say y'all wherever you're listening and uh i i i would encourage you when they say is there anything we could do for you uh that we're not doing now ask them to give you an expense account expressly for financial planning now church might come back and say oh we have three financial planners in the church that would look no no no no no pastors don't want to share all that with their but if you're a board member and you're listening you want to help your head of school you want to help your ceo of a non-profit you want to help your pastor provide for them whatever it would cost to have good financial planning early on so that they can lock into a good plan because i mean ben franklin's right the greatest secret in the world is compound interests get started early and you're fine and churches would fall all over themselves to spend the three to five thousand dollars a year that it would take to have really good financial planning and save them the more expensive conversation later how much of its identity how much of it is all my best days are behind me yeah well well so this that's that's i hear two very different things when you say that um having been a pastor and and then a former pastor and and rather suddenly um i was i was shocked how empty i felt when people didn't need me or call me or want me to be important in their life i i i it consumes you it consumes you and i'm not like my dad wasn't a preacher my granddad wasn't a preacher it's not like this is the family thing and it's gone and so like i was just a i was kind of the weird one when when i told my family i was going to go into ministry my grandmother said we were a big family dinner and she said oh good now we've got one to get us all in so like you could have some grandma right exactly so you know this is not like the family business that i gave up but i don't know of another job on the planet except maybe being like a head of state that consumes your identity it's where you do your life it's where you do your spiritual life it's where you do your relationships it's where your kids grow up it's where your kids get married it's where you bury your friends and when you walk away you walk away from a lot and oh by the way they don't call you well you think it's because of who you are but it turned out to be because of what you do to a large extent i don't know if you i mean you're the interviewer here not me i don't know if you've experienced this but i i i had a lot of leaders in this church i was in and one of them was a guy uh lloyd benson he was a senator here oh yeah i know that name yep yeah he ran for vice president uh when dukakis ran against bush and and bush had dan quayle and and his famous line was i knew jack kennedy and you know jack kennedy and like so anyway um lloyd was in our church and i he uh had a stroke and was not able to communicate much but his wife asked me to be the chaplain of the u.s senate for a day it's an honorary thing that you go do and so i went to do it and and my host was a guy named tom daschle who used to be the senate majority leader and from one of the dakotas i don't even remember which one but he he the november after i was there he lost reelection just out of the blue i don't know how you lose an election in the quotas you just call everyone there right there's something but anyway he lost and i called miss benson and i said miss benson what's the best way to write him a note saying so sorry she said i'll just give you his home phone number i said i'm not calling senator daschle at home and she said oh william you have no idea how little the phone rings once you're not in office wow like that's what's going to happen pastor and uh it is part of the reason people wait too long i'd say the three biggest reasons succession have failed up till now is in in maybe no particular order is uh finances a lack of a calling to something else so you're giving up your whole identity and you don't have anything to backfill with you know the the priests in the old testament retired from carrying stuff around the desert but they had new priestly duties right so and then the third is uh the whole family is uprooted like you you got five family members on staff and they're not ready to give up or the the spouse is not ready to give up that role and man those three things if you could focus on those three things and and be ready in those three areas you're going to be ahead of 95 of the whole field yeah i would just vouch for that honestly as someone who went a little bit early everything you're saying completely resonates and the mentors who've coached me i got a lot of coaching and counseling in the early days and of the succession but even over the last year you know i started to feel it in my heart and in my gut like oh this is the end here it comes and it was a bit emotional for a week or two and called a couple of friends and and they just said they forget you fast and don't screw this up it's going really really well like don't don't sabotage it don't wreck it and it's been going great but yeah that whole idea of um you know you give your whole life to something and then you realize oh that was the position some of it was definitely the heart and we gotten some nice notes but um and then what am i gonna do with my days right and so i have the privilege of being able to do this and i love it and i feel like it's a call on the whole deal but i think a lot of us who are made to work and i feel that way like this is kind of my retirement i love doing this and i enjoy it and i get up with a spring in my step but it's a bigger part of your identity and i think i'll be disentangling that for a while to come so i just want to say i hear about that 15 years later i still am are you how does that show up how does that show up at this point william you asked me a question i take 20 minutes to answer it could have been a sermon oh you know um i i do get the chance to pastor two pastors yeah so there's a the the priestly part still gets to come out um but i'd say carrie you know the hardest i think the hardest decision adrian and i have had our entire marriage has been where are we going to go to church because i'd turn into a snob i'm not going to go to my former church in the press training world that just doesn't work but you know so it's not like where you are where it makes total sense for you to be at connecticut but it's weird when you're not like in on the meetings anymore and you're not up on stage and you're not like it's weird and you're sitting there going this doesn't feel like my spot adrian told me adrian told me when we uh landed at the church that we're at and we love she said she knew it was getting better because i wasn't sitting rewriting the sermon for the pastor while he was giving it [Laughter] yes i may have done that no it's hard i mean i think turning into a snob why don't they do it this way they're missing that yeah that's how it shows up now but i don't know how andy says it andy always says it so well andy stanley but he's like you know it kind of wrecks you because you're um listening at church rather than listening to the preacher you're listening at the sermon rather than listening to the sermon and it is very hard to suspend like curiosity why did he do the intro that way like i really want to know or it's like well i wouldn't have done it why didn't you start with a story and then you get into that critical space in your head and you're like oh this is not good now i need to go to confession somewhere or something i don't know see the way that that was that's that's exactly what i was doing and that's why i just started rewriting the sermon for him just gave me something to do it's like oh you have this for free okay normally i would charge but you can have this for free yeah no it is it is a weird disentangling i think it's some kind of spiritual discipline um how would you know i i've done a lot of thinking on this and i'd love to pick your brain but signs it's time to go like there is someone listening to this who goes but no william i have one more season left in me and then there are others who are like no i get it i should have been gone four years ago last year two years ago but it's money it's identity it's i don't know how to have the conversation right any any signs that you've looked for in your own life or things you've seen in your work or your research that's like yeah that's a good time to go when you see these i think uh a couple of the signs that i'm seeing around so so if you ask the question uh we did this through research when does god usually put his hand on a pastor for growth at what age right so we took and this is a very small sample group there's probably a lot larger but churches that had the same pasture for a long period of time that had some modicum of growth over a sustained period of time so what were the growth rates and how old was the pastor during those growth rates so you know just is there a time and if you show me a church that's had the same pastor for a while and show me their growth rate i can show you exactly where the pastor's 40th birthday is because things spike and and if you're sitting there saying i'm 33 and i got to get going i'm not getting enough done you're not even at the start line yet so things spike at 40. tell me more absolutely i mean you know now there are some outliers steve furtick's gotten quite a bit done before 40. yeah yeah he's done okay he's doing all right although i think he is now in that power generation but uh i think he did cross over the the the river into the 40s but uh uh you know i don't know if it's because in texas we would say by the time you when i when i went to first press houston at 31 i i got so much wrong i didn't know how far i was over my head um and i tell people the one thing i i really had going for me was i i knew everything right at 31 like i could identify now i wouldn't even be able to identify with it then but my very favorite ted turner quote i think i've told this to you before he said if i had a little more humility i'd be perfect and that was 30 year old william that was it and and by the time you're at 40 in texas you'd say i've gotten knocked off my horse enough now that i know what i don't know so there's something that happens at 40 that causes growth now show me the same chart i'll show you where the 40th birthday is i can also show you another line that's either their 55th or 60th birthday and what what line is that where it flattens and starts to decline yep and and maybe it's 65 and there are outliers ed young here in town is 83 still taking two steps at a time when he goes up the stairs uh still preaching live i mean he's amazing so there are outliers right but but the really unfortunate thing is that unlike the hockey stick at 40 it's not a hockey stick back down at 60. it's just a flattening and a slow decline well i think you said the words mailing it in and and so like i'm turning your question a little bit but how do you prevent that well when you're growing go ahead and set key indicators go set key indicators for it now i know it's time and don't bail and say well you know people don't come to church as frequently as they used to sorry don't blame the culture don't blame the culture right i mean you can pay attention to those things but uh i i would say as i talked to so i never got to 60 as a pastor so i'm not like i don't have you know personal experience to bank on but guys that i talked to they're 60 i talked to one today yeah 62 in great shape huge church and he's he's done and he said what so many said he said i still like preaching it's all the other crap that's making me so tired yeah or another pastor that said do you know how many board meetings i have to turn 65 because i do like the person who tells you how many days until the retirement someone who's pensioned right or whatever it's like yeah i have 3 218 days till i'm done you know i used to think i was going to be a phd because i didn't want to be a pastor i wanted a respectable job i thought pastors had bad hair and asked people for money and uh yeah i grew up around jim and tammy baker was my backyard growing up so like the ptl club i'll go be a professor and then i realized professors only teach students about four hours out of the whole week and the rest of it is being in the library and reading what god i hate that kind of i can't stand sitting still but flip it to the pastorate your preaching is only this much of your time when you start to lose joy in the daily grind of ministry and i don't mean it got hard because i know it's the hardest job i've had it but you really start to lose joy and you don't gain any energy from it and you know that's a clear warning sign that it is time to start mailing it in i would agree with that i would say in my late 40s i started to notice okay some of the stuff that used to energize me doesn't energize me and some of the things i used to be excited about don't excite me and it was too many meetings and too much this and the part of the job i still liked was preaching and i went i think if you extrapolate this seven to ten years this is where you end up with that plateau and decline and the phoning it in and i'm like i'm gonna hand this off and the year i've finished we had double-digit growth and you know it was it was great so you kind of went out on a high but i i can totally relate to that and sometimes like what i'm doing now i still wake up pretty much delirious every morning that i get to do what i do so that's a that's a great feeling you know and and things shift and change i mean yeah you're in a church that's been the same forever and you're just doing a faithful job attending the flog you're going to have a nicer place in heaven than carrie and i do i promise truth you know you you're on the front lines you're doing the real deal it does not have to be go go grow so you know when when you start getting worn out by the daily grind that's a good sign for some people the ministry grows and your job changes there are lots of people that when they're 50 they don't want to keep doing the same things and they shouldn't their job should change and it it you don't have to be first in the office last out or retire it's not one or the other you can find ways to get more done with fewer hours i'm not at all saying once you quit wanting to be a workaholic which i think most overachievers are in their 30s you know that's not it it's it's more of a is this draining you more than it's feeding you yeah because at the end of the day if you're drained it's going to show up it's going to show up in your leadership it's going to show up in realizing your mission what do you say you've got sections in your book on this for uh because there are also leaders listening who are like great i just hope the senior pastor my boss listens to this and he probably won't or she probably won't how do i have the conversation with somebody who doesn't want to have the conversation will you yeah that's really really hard yeah yeah and i don't if you're a subordinate staff i don't know that you get to ah so may not be your role may not be your role and it's certainly not your role to go talk to the board about it so they can do something about it there's a word for that it's called absalom and uh you know they're i'm serious who who what king in the bible should have hung it up sooner than he did how about saul right he should have hung it up like he kind of lost the whole deal what did david do about it not much he refused to lay a hand on god's anointed and god honored that so i don't want to get all preacher on you but uh i would say you tread very lightly into telling your pastor it's time or having someone else tell the pastor it's time now you know an announcement maybe could that be a time for that leader to kind of realize they've hit a glass ceiling in the organization whether they want to be the successor or not and then you evaluate your own options right it's like well maybe it's time for me to move on it's it's one kingdom with many locations right so maybe it's your turn to go from village to village and town to town yeah and let god work it out as god will work it out sometimes i've seen it sometimes pastors will hire me for succession and one of two things happens when we get into consultation either it speeds up or it slows down it never stays on the same schedule they thought and sometimes it'll slow down because the pastor hangs on too long sometimes the pastor really does hear a word from the lord as only they have been able to for the history of the church i need to hang in there i need to and you look back with hindsight you're like wow how'd they know that so i just the longer i do this the more stern i am toward those in the second chair or the third chair saying let god sort that out pray all you want but do not sow any seeds of discord or approach the conversation you can send them a free copy of the book maybe you do that you know earmark that page yeah exactly okay but the good news if you're sitting in that second chair if you'd asked me this same question 10 years ago i'd have said i hate this for you because no one really talks about it the good news is everyone is talking about it right now every peer group of pastors in their 60s it is i get called in i get called in whether it's the leaders of the southern baptist church the leaders of the presbyterian church i got called in two years ago to a meeting of the the hundred senior pastors of the hundred largest black churches in the u.s okay not like ethnically diverse they're like no we're black churches but i was the diversity in the room like that's it and i'm like guys why are y'all having me because this is a conversation and it's time to have it and we don't even know how to wow i want to be really careful with the next question but um you raise it in the book and you were very public on your profile and you and i have had some conversations but you led the willow creek search and i think that was one of those things where uh you know with bill hybels he had tried the succession was 15 years ago that didn't work and then all the allegations came forward and uh resigned in moral failure etc and the church just kind of fell apart what did what are some lessons there that can help and i'm not here to point fingers i'm not here to blame i i don't like to engage in that but um you do have some lessons in the book about that and hundreds of other churches you talk about the crystal cathedral you talk about many churches others have not heard of but that was something you know everybody including people who don't go to church kind of watch transpire so anything you can share that would help leaders um try to figure out here's something constructive we can take from that well i've got one real clear constructive but a little back story first and that is uh you know i've seen the sausage factory right and particularly a lot of it with willow and i have so much respect for that church and i was i was a pastor carrie i i was in seminary i thought i was going to be the phd and be a professor at school because i wasn't going to be a preacher and then you know i realized that wasn't going to work i got in a wrestling match with god i limp and i became a pastor you know i lost and um i went into ministry and was just kind of doing what i grew up with was being a persian pastor of a regular church and you just kind of take care of people which is a great calling for a whole lot of people but i am like a serial entrepreneur and this was like oil and water and i i started my d man my doctoral ministry early at reform seminary and they let me sign up early and i ended up having dinner with someone at the school and said sign up today well the only class that was open was a class on like small groups or something like okay fine and i had to go to this church to a conference to take the class and it was to willa creek and it was their old you know boot camp conference they did years and years ago and i remember where i was sitting in the lakeside auditorium when bill did that thing that only he can do where he reached from the stage i remember what he was wearing because he wore the same thing throughout the 1990s but i i i he reached out from the stage and somehow all the way across that auditorium and tapped me on the chest and god used that moment to to have a mini conversion and change my ministry so you know human leaders should always be respected but we can't can't ever forget they have clay feet right so i don't want to throw him under the bus or through the church no no it's it's one of the most perplexing things and i've had this discussion many times i would not be where i am today were it not for bill so i you know and i i made a point throughout the search of not contacting him one time because i don't want him to have to say well william i don't want me to have to say the board so stayed out of that but what what what are some lessons okay i want to give that back story so people understand i am so unwilling to throw rocks here right and it's not unwilling to take a stand here's here's the back story to every one of those succession stories you listed whether it's crystal cathedral or first baptist dallas or first press hollywood or willow creek or churches you don't even remember laodicea smyrna you know go through the seven that aren't there anymore no pastor wakes up one morning and says i think i want to blow up my church [Music] not one but part of the reason i was excited to do the rewrite of the book was i had to get rid of marshall seattle i couldn't talk about new spring in south carolina anymore in perry i couldn't like lots and lots of examples it's a long list and and some of it is not even these guys faults i mean that's a long podcast we can do another time but but nobody wakes up and says let me wreck my church okay um i think the the other big lesson that i learned from willow one of the things they did really well and and the jury's going to be out i mean it'd be 20 years before we know whether the thing worked or not right so let's not claim success um they do have an amazing pastor and dave dummy we gave them our best consultant to be their exec pastor and tim stevens and uh you know it they've got a lot of good going for them but i i think that um one of the coolest things i saw was the elders that stepped down got replaced by people that have never been elders and i used to joke and say it's like i'm i've got all rookies playing in the super bowl trying to pick a pastor i mean it wasn't and somebody pointed out to me very wisely he said but william that's how willow's always worked it was a bunch of kids that didn't know what they were doing and so now they've got elders that don't know what they're doing and they did a good job and it's like maybe the lesson is when you get in this crisis the place blew up and you didn't know why maybe it's why paul said to one of those churches in revelation remember your first loves like when you find yourself in that heart just go back to the first things and try and recapture some of that and and that might be your guiding light through a really hard time for pastors that have blown it up hey man i've blown stuff up too i'm telling you i i just want to clarify i know you're not saying this but just to to uh clarify yeah maybe it's you know in some cases there are situations where it's not their fault but if you hurt people and harm other people that is your responsibility totally i know you agree with that i just wanted to say that just to i hurt people i caused harm it was my fault yeah i will own it yeah but that doesn't mean god's done with you yeah it's it's really interesting and again to quote gordon mcdonald i had a friend text me who was dealing with a moral failure that will not make the headlines like you know it's just this happens every day right it's just some of the big churches make the headlines and a lot of the other churches don't and it was an associate position at the staff and he said what is a good content out here because i think there's two things it's either you know somebody says they're sorry they want to get back into ministry the day after they resign and like i'm back and i'm starting to church or i'm doing this and i'm like i don't think that's it or you banish them to the wilderness to die forever and nobody ever hears of them or speaks to them again and their life is functionally over and there's no reconciliation i don't think that's it either but gordon macdonald wrote ordering your private world but then of course he had uh he had an affair which many people would say was out of character for him and um he was deeply remorseful and then wrote a book called or rebuilding your broken world and that didn't sell nearly as many copies as ordering your private world both are great books but i think it's part three of that book and we'll link to it in the show notes has a process for restoration that i think just should get front news coverage in the church these days because you put yourself under the authority of other people you forfeit your rights you go back when they say you're ready not when you say you're ready and there's a whole restoration process in there and i found it just so redemptive and in the few cases where that's been followed it has been a beautiful and harmonious restoration for all involved and true reconciliation um and ironically i might be wrong about this i'm fairly certain i'm right but ironically one of the people gordon submitted to for guidance about when to come back was bill yeah you might be right that i don't know but i believe he was on that group but and why do i bring that up not to defend him but just to say you know if you screwed up yeah there's a price to pay right but it doesn't mean it's over i mean i just doesn't mean it's over and i i you know i used to when we started this carry we part of what we get hired to do when we're finding a leader is making sure that we're finding people who are who they say they are right so you're not getting a charlatan or somebody who's you know telling fibs or looks great online but it's not so good in person right and uh so you ask these questions in an interview say that you you want to find out if there's skeletons on the closet right and so you try and find cute ways of saying it and i don't do this anymore but one of the dumbest ways i've ever asked this question is i used to say so so carrie are there any moral failures that we need to go ahead and talk about now rather than find out about later do you have any moral failures in your life and i i was asking this question and then there's probably gosh probably 10 11 years ago now and this kid i was interviewing for a youth pastor position he was probably 24 25 hey are there any moral failures in your life and he just looked at me and said william i am a moral failure so you know this is why jesus came here doesn't mean you can go back to your church doesn't mean you should go plant something right down the road but jesus came here to seek and save the lost and that's not just once and for all and i just encourage you you probably didn't set out to blow up your church and you may not be able to go back there but it doesn't mean that god's done with you yeah in my case you know my marriage stayed intact and um you know there was no scandal i just kind of imploded when i burned out and i thought it was over i just i worked too hard i worked too long and it's not like i was perfect i had stuff god was working on in my life but nothing that would get me you know fired or anything like that and um i thought it was over and i had no idea that it was a refining for what was ahead and i think that is a good word and i know there's a lot of tired a lot of discouraged leaders there's a great book we'll link into the show notes i'm trying to remember who it was from but it was about um 10 reasons that people have moral failure we'll find it we'll link it to it in the show notes i'm trying to remember uh who it was and i read it and it was like things like i stayed too long or i was out of season or i wasn't wasn't with the people who could hold me accountable or whatever but there were some really unlikely ones as well we'll link to that in the show notes so if you find yourself there uh we we want to help and uh that that gets back to carrie the whole how do you know it's time to go a lot of guys that that really and i say guys because we're the ones that mess up more than the women most of the time and yes that was chauvinistic and sorry guys we're the ones that's good we mess it up a lot you know um leaning on empty doesn't work leading on empty doesn't work i think what got me was his research and he researched this was like if you're six months over when you should have made a shift whether that's a job change or a calling change or an organization change he says you get bored and you start getting restless and that's when the not very healthy behavior starts so anyway it's it's a really interesting we'll find the book i will discover it william covered so much anything else you want to share before we uh no no you know i just say i'd just say uh you know willows had a hard time we talked about them um they're going to have choppy water before it gets better probably but man being in the middle of that and watching how jesus is moving in that church i you know there are still people who love jesus i thought dave was a great choice for that and he brought in some of his team too uh i think he brought his assistant and uh that's why we we we actually talked to dave because we wanted to get hayley there yeah she's sharp she's really sharp dave's a consolation prize to the church haley's the winner um yeah no i i just say that to say you know you might not be a willow creek you might be well we only had 100 people before cove and i don't even know if people are going to come back you know jesus is working in his church and and we go into some of the biggest train wrecks in the whole kingdom and jesus is still there i promise you he's working in your church no matter what it feels like this year um hey that's a great place to close this round love having you on love our conversations thanks for helping so many leaders so tell us about the book and then website where people can find you well the book that everybody needs to read is a book about burnout but it doesn't come out till next year so we'll talk about that again later okay oh i think i think that's something that i want to hear what you have to say about the book that we released in march of 2020 it's a fantastic time to release a book is uh next pastoral succession that works and this is an updated and expanded version um it's not in bright yellow so your staff won't notice if you buy it we change the color of the jacket to a nice soothing blue but there's there's a whole lot more research in there and more than we can unpack here about what works and what doesn't work when it comes to pastoral transitions all right well william thank you so much yes always good to be with you carrie [Music] well i hope today's episode was helpful to you you can always get more by subscribing to my channel i also have a lot more content over at carrienewhof.com for leaders and business and leaders and churches and you can get transcripts of this episode there and so much more plus some other stuff i do for leaders so head on over there to discover more at caryknewhof.com and in the meantime i really hope our time together today has helped you lead like never before

Channel: Carey Nieuwhof

Views: 4,121

Rating: 4.9333334 out of 5

Keywords: Carey Nieuwhof podcast, Carey Nieuwhof leadership podcast, William Vanderbloemen, William Vanderbloemen interviews, church trends, staffing a church, how to staff a church

Id: ky96ERJqiBA

Length: 85min 30sec (5130 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 01 2020