← GrowLeader Podcast with Chris Hodges
GrowLeader Podcast with Chris Hodges
93 | David Ashcraft - Lessons From 30+ Years of Ministry - Chris Hodges
00:31:38
Loading summary
Transcript54 lines
- [00:02]
A
Hey, everybody, and welcome to the Grow Leader Podcast, where we grow leaders that grow churches by helping them reach their full potential. Today we get to listen in on a conversation between Pastor Chris Hodges and David Ashcraft, who has spent decades leading at a high level, from pastoring one church for over 30 years to now serving leaders from literally around the world. It's not just a conversation about leadership. It's actually a conversation about what leadership does to you over time. Let's get started.
- [00:31]
B
Well, it's great to have everybody on the podcast today, and one of my favorite things that I get to do on this podcast is interview great leaders, and boy, do we have one today in David Ashcraft. He's a new relationship to me. We're actually getting ready to do some things together as well as host a Grow Leader one day there in Pennsylvania, where a lot of the work and ministry that he's been responsible for has happened. But, David, welcome to the Grow Leader podcast.
- [00:59]
C
Thank you, Chris. It's great to be with you today, and I have appreciated you from afar, so it's fun to be developing this new relationship.
- [01:05]
B
Yeah, me too. And, man, I've heard so much about you. And of course, you're intricately part of and leading the global leadership network, which isn't it probably like the largest gathering of pastors and leaders in the world?
- [01:20]
C
Yeah, I think it's been around for 32 years now, and this past year, we figure we'll have a little over 400,000 people participating in the summit. Yeah, that's a lot.
- [01:28]
B
Okay, there you go.
- [01:29]
C
It's been real good. It's been great.
- [01:30]
B
Well, we want to dive into everything that you know about leadership, and especially in the area of pastoral leadership. We have so many pastors and leaders. We have whole staff teams who gather around together and watch this podcast together, so. And take notes, because one of the promises that we make here at Grow Leader is that we're going to give you tools. I mean, yeah, we're going to have fun conversation, but if you just want to be entertained, there are other podcasts for. But if you like to pick up some tools to really grow your life, grow your leadership, grow your ministry, and the promise we make to help you reach your full potential, well, then you've hit the right one at the Grow Leader. So tell us your story. Like, jump into this is how I got into ministry. Tell us the LCBC story. People don't even know what that means. You'll tell them, but kind of orient us to all things David Ashcraft.
- [02:22]
C
Yeah, sounds Good. So, Chris, before I forget it, LCBC stands for Lives Changed by Christ. And it's always gone by lcbc. Even when we were a small church, that acronym stuck. Early days, it was Lancaster County Bible Church. And then as we started moving beyond Lancaster county, then we just changed into Lives Changed by Christ. And we just say, that's who we are. We're a community of people whose lives have been continue to be changed by Christ. So my story real quick. I grew up in the Dallas, Texas area. My dad was a pastor. Everybody told me I was going to follow in my father's footsteps. I was very determined, not mainly because I didn't like people telling me what I was going to be when I grew up. So I went off and studied business in college. Thought I was going to go to law school. And when it came time to apply to grad school, ended up applying to Dallas Theological Seminary and getting Bible theological training and started working at my dad's church and worked with him for about 10 years in the Dallas area. It was a church of about 2,500 people. And it was real formative for me, Chris, where I saw things that I liked. I saw a lot of things that I didn't like. And so it helped me kind of figure out when I had the opportunity. Here's the kind of church I would like to try to develop. So those years were real good for me. And I think when you talk about tools, one of the tools, I think, is patience. To be honest with you, that I would recommend for guys and women is I think we get so anxious and we want to, in our minds, we think we're ready, and we may not be as ready as we think, especially when we're younger. And so that ability just to be patient, learn, begin to file away in your head what you really like and what you want to duplicate or replicate when you have opportunity to, but also what you don't want to do. And so for me, early years of LCBC, I moved to Pennsylvania 1991. And for a Texan to move out of Texas was a real big deal. And it was in the middle of the music wars and churches. The Northeast was considered the Rust Belt when I went. So all our friends said, why in the world would you want to go to the Rust Belt? And fell in love with a group of people, about 150 people. At that time. My title was senior pastor. And I always joke and say it's funny because I was the only pastor. I was the only staff person. So there was really nobody else with me.
- [04:26]
B
So you started a church from scratch in Pennsylvania?
- [04:28]
C
Well, it had been gone for about three years, but it hadn't really done much. So 150 people. But what attracted me, Chris, was they wanted to be a church that really reached people for Christ. And you know, every church will tell you they want to, and it's in their doctrinal statements and they'll talk about it, they just won't do it. And so, and it was unique for me. I had looked at about 30 churches in Texas over a two year period and all of them again said they wanted to introduce people to Jesus, but you could just tell real quickly they didn't. And so that's what attracted.
- [05:00]
B
Why is that? Let me pause your story right there. What do you think is the myth for people to say they oh yeah, we're a city reaching church, but they don't reach their city and they're not evangelistic, they're not reaching souls. I mean, what do you.
- [05:14]
C
So again, yeah, these are my biases, Chris, and whether they're right or not, I don't know. Just tell us. I think part of it, you know, the churches that I looked at In Texas, those 30 churches, what I came away from every one of them feeling is they weren't looking really even for a leader. They were looking for somebody to come and hold their hand, pat them on the back when they needed help. And these were all churches, they weren't big churches, anywhere from two to 500 people. But they weren't looking for a leader nor did they want to introduce people to Jesus. They wanted to talk about it, but they wanted people who would come into their church. They were already well established in their faith that had already cleaned up all the messes in their lives. And I mean, you know real well that when you do start introducing people to Jesus, they're going to bring along messes, they're going to bring along issues that you're not used to dealing with in most churches. The funny thing is I would rather though deal with those issues than the issues of people that have been in church for years and years and have a lot of baggage as well. Yeah.
- [06:06]
B
So continue the story. So you kind of took over a small church. What happened from there first five or.
- [06:12]
C
Six years were very tumultuous. Didn't know that we were going to make it through. One of the things I will tell you, as well as patience and things to learn for pastors, I made a commitment when I went to lcbc. I just said to God, I'm not Going to leave. I'm not going to look to leave unless you were the one that moves me. And what I meant by that is I wasn't going to be watching the Dallas Seminary job listings and looking for opportunities. And I had. Growing up around Dallas Seminary in Dallas, I just watched guys come through all the time, always looking over their shoulders for the next best thing. And even the mentality was, you know, if you're in a church of 200, you stay there for five years, and then maybe you move to a church of 400 and you just keep moving. And I just didn't want to do that. And so I said to God, I won't go looking, and unless you move me, then I'm staying. And he never did bring opportunity early on to move. And so we stayed. But the first five, six years were tough. And there were people. The elder that brought us to LCBC within six months, in the middle of a board meeting, got up and very ceremoniously took his key off his keychain. You know, small church, everybody's got a key to the building. And so he took his key to the building off his keychain and slapped it on the table and said, you don't need me anymore. You've got David. And he walked out. And up until that point, whenever things didn't go his way, then he would throw a little tantrum, and then the board would kind of go his way. I don't even remember what the issue was that night, Chris. But they didn't go his way. And so he walked out. About 12 months later, the next board chairman did essentially the exact same thing. And then another 12 months later, another one did. And I say all that not because I'm proud that I ran off board chairman, but there is a. I guess there's a tenacity you have to have. There is a determination, probably a sense of call. I mean, had I not felt that that's where God wanted me to be, it had been real easy to pack up and go back to Texas.
- [07:59]
B
I'm kind of proud of you, man. That's. That not many people are willing to do that. And I heard somebody say one time, sometimes you have to grow by subtraction, not by addition.
- [08:09]
C
So definitely.
- [08:10]
B
And we tolerate. Don't you think we tolerate too much? Sometimes that is actually toxic to the culture and what you're trying to build.
- [08:19]
C
Yeah, exactly. And so I think part of that was stubbornness. Ruth would. I like to call it determination. She says, I'm stubborn but determined and just feeling like that's where God had called me. And knowing that I didn't have an escape hatch because I told God I wasn't going to look. And he wasn't providing anything else. At that time, there was a guy in the church named Abe. Abe disliked me for a number of reasons. He would tell me, so back in 1991, in the early 90s in Pennsylvania small churches, we would have mailboxes in the back hallway and you would stuff all of the news about the church in those mailboxes. And so Abe would come almost every Sunday morning, stuff the boxes with news about me that he disliked. And he was just an antagonist for five or six years. And you know, it was just. It was tough. And whenever Christmas would come around, Ruth would say, okay, are we packing up our decorations for a move or are we packing up for next year? Because it just. You weren't sure we were going to make it or not. And so. And at that time, I was also listening a lot to John Maxwell. He would talk about the average pastor only staying around two, two and a half years. And he'd talk about storm clouds and you're in the middle of a storm and if you just wait, then that storm will pass. And so it took about five or six years for that storm to pass. But it did. And once we got through, we said, why would we ever think of leaving and going someplace else? Because we're just going to have to go through this again.
- [09:36]
B
So what happened there? It obviously grew eventually into multi side. Tell us about some of those tipping points and the moments that got you from one season to the next, because there's tons of pastors that are listening right now that can identify with this story, wondering if the daily grind and the constant plowing will ever produce, but it obviously did. And they don't even know. Many people don't even know the rest of this story. And I do that it turned into something quite significant. So kind of give us the different stages, but also give us the tipping point, the leadership lessons, the thing most responsible for getting to that next level.
- [10:18]
C
Well, you know your comment of if you keep doing the right things, then eventually things will turn. And I think that that's true. It happened for us. We were growing during that stage. We went from that initial 100 to about 600 people. But it was tough. But somewhere about five or six years in, we quit talking about who we wanted to be and we just started being it. And I wish I could tell and actually define the moment that it switched. And I can't but something changed and people really got involved in introducing more people to church and to Jesus. One of the things that helped, and I think again, another lesson learned was Ruth and I were. We weren't doing this to be an example, but we moved. When we moved from Texas, we had to rent for about three. Well, actually about seven years before we could buy a house. The people we rented from were well known in the community. They were unchurched people. And within about six to 12 months, they came to the church, came to Christ, and about 40 of their extended family did as well. And everybody noticed that everybody in the community knew them. And that was just. It was those kind of things that just triggered people going, okay, this works, and, and let's be telling our friends and family about Jesus. So we went from that 600 people after about five or six years to about seven or 8,000 people over the next seven or eight years, which obviously.
- [11:39]
B
Include building buildings and raising money and all this numerous.
- [11:43]
C
Yeah, it was raising money. We thought the first time we were going to do a capital campaign before we did, we were doing about six or seven gatherings on the weekend. And, you know, it's those kind of things, Chris, where you're preaching so many times, by the end of the day on Sunday, you don't even know who your family is, and you don't really know what you've said. So it was exhausting. And I was real worried when we went through that first capital campaign that people. It was the first time we were asking for money. And so I thought, you know, we're going to shrink as a church. And we actually grew by 50% through that first initial campaign. And I think the reason, it wasn't really even about a building, it was about introducing more people to Jesus. And so we would tell people, we said, we're going to build a bigger building. It's not for you. You guys are already coming. And you'll come Saturday at 4, Saturday at 6, or Sunday at 3, but your friends probably won't. And so we're not doing this for you. We're doing this for your friends or co workers that don't yet know Jesus. And so it was very much focused on vision as opposed to the building. And I think sometimes I watch pastors get caught up in the building itself and think that's the most important thing, and it's not. And so where that served us well then, every time now We've built over 40 buildings, and every time we do, it's about vision. And people just know that. And so it just helps you in the future as you move forward. So that was important for us each step of the way. Chris we kept asking, are we done yet? And so even in our first building, we filled up the one gathering we had and we needed to go to two. And you'd have thought it was going to be the end of the world for some people. And once we went to two, it was no big deal. And so then we were able to go to multiple multiples. We hit a block in around 2003 or 4005, where we had grown to about 8,000 people in our location. And we're out in the middle of nowhere. So we're rural Pennsylvania, farmland all around, and the town that we're in is about 4,000 people. And so the township started complaining and saying, you're taking up too much farmland and you're creating congestion on our road. Everything around us are two lane roads. And so they said, we're not going to permit you to grow again because we were going to build and expand. And so that forced us to again ask that question, are we done yet? And we said, no, we're not done. And so we started looking around the country, saw multi site as it was just getting started in the early 2000s, and we said we could do this. And I was more excited about that, to be honest with you, than church planting. I know church planting is incredibly important. I just struggled with jumping into that for a variety of reasons. And so we said, multisite, we can do this. And so we jumped into that. And what's fun now, just this last weekend, we had about 28,000 people across 25 locations, and about 5,000 of those were at our first location. So had we not, had the township not told us no, we would have kept building on one site and it would have been limited in what we're doing. Whereas now we've got 20, some 20,000 people, more at other locations than our original site.
- [14:38]
B
That reminds me of the SECO story with Greg Surratt. The city restricted them from building. It wasn't their vision to be multi side. It was the restrictions to be able to grow that led them to that idea that obviously God blessed. And now it's something that many churches are a part of. To do any of that, David, to do any of that requires. My mind's just racing with, you know, the principles of scaling because you have leadership development. I mean, when you, you know, so it's no longer, you know, one drummer for a Sunday. Now you have to have all these locations, have to have drummers every, every aspect of church life. So obviously, you've learned a lot about scaling. You learn a lot about leadership development. None of this happens without culture and of course, the presence of God in the hand of God. Give us some keys that you've learned that, like, man, you've got to know this in order to see God bless what you're doing, to see it scale, to see it grow. I mean, give us a few leadership lessons that are kind of unique to David Ashcraft. Like, man, I'm just telling you, this works. This is something I learned throughout that whole process.
- [15:45]
C
Well, some of them, and they're all real basic, Chris. One is just learning to say no.
- [15:50]
B
And you unpack that really deeply, though, because I think I know. I want to make sure everybody listening knows.
- [15:58]
C
There are so many opportunities that come our way and everybody in the congregation has a great idea, they think. And so what we learned real early on, we constantly talk about, is this best or is this good or is this best? And there are lots of good things that we could be involved in early on, because again, small town, we were a larger church. And so the township came, and the churches pastors and the township came and they wanted to eliminate the sale of alcohol in our town. And so they said, you're the biggest church. If you can get your people to sign petitions of no more alcohol in the community, then we can eradicate alcohol. And we looked at that and we said, you know, that might be a good thing, but for us, it's not the best thing. The best thing for us is introducing people to Jesus. And if we become known as the church that eliminated the sale of alcohol in our town, nobody's going to want to come, and at least not the people we're trying to reach. And so we said, no, we're not going to do that. And so instantly, all the churches and church leaders in the community were mad at us and couldn't believe we wouldn't do that. And so you have to be willing to say no to good ideas and then take the heat for it, because you will take heed and you'll have people in your church. I mean, whether it's, you know, some churches want to be the adoption or the, you know, taking care of children in the community, there's so many good things, and there's nothing wrong with them. But we would constantly say, man, that's good, but we've got to stay focused on introducing people to Jesus. We're going to say no. And people get mad at you when you do that.
- [17:17]
B
So when you say introduce people to Jesus, you're obviously very good at that, seeing when something grows like it did. What does that mean? Unpack what you have to do as a church to be a reaching people for Jesus church that maybe some other churches aren't doing.
- [17:35]
C
Well, I think first of all, you've got to make introducing people to Jesus simple. And actually for the entire church, it gets complex, but you've got to keep it simple. And so coming out of my Dallas seminary background, it wasn't easy, as we were taught, to introduce somebody to Jesus and you had to know the four spiritual laws or you had to make it complicated. The church that I grew up in, we actually hired a pastor of evangelism. And what would happen in that church is when people would have a friend or a co worker that was close to coming to know Jesus, then you'd take them to Pastor Bill because he's the one that knew how to get them across the line of faith. And I just did not like that at all. And so for me and what we teach at LCBC's all the time is just tell your story, tell people who you were before you met Jesus, how you met Jesus, what's happened since. And nobody can. You know, the reason why I think people shy away from introducing people to Jesus is they're afraid they're going to say the wrong thing, they're going to say it the wrong way. And we just constantly say, nobody can argue about your story. I mean, you know your story. And so they can't object to that. And so if you're just real clear that this is what Jesus did in my life, then you're going to be successful in bringing people to Jesus. And so we constantly would talk about that kind of thing. Yeah. So I think keeping it simple is probably the biggest thing for me.
- [18:49]
B
Give us again where it all is today. Give us the LCBC footprint kind of over in Pennsylvania and beyond.
- [18:57]
C
Yeah. And I meant to tell you just a minute ago, too. One of our other big principles, Chris, is you can't make everybody happy. You can't please everyone. And I watch pastors all the time try to keep everybody happy. And they say they're not, but often they are. And so that's why they don't say no to certain things. Because you've got somebody in your church that's got an idea, that's a good idea, they want you to do it, and they want the whole church to jump in rather than offend then to keep them happy, you Say yes. And so one of the things that's really helped us over the years is what we call the 9010 rule. And the 9010 for us is we want 90% of our people to be wildly enthusiastic about us, and 10% can be wildly upset with us, and we're okay with that. And what it's done is given us permission to make decisions that sometimes are hard decisions. And it's okay if people are mad. And even today, as we have grown. So if we, like I said last weekend, had 28,000 people, then 10% of 28,000 is 2,800 people. And we will send out, we'll do something at church that maybe ruffles some feathers. And so we'll get 40 or 50 emails complaining about it, and we get all up in arms and go, oh, no, there's 40 or 50 emails. And at some point, somebody always will go, okay, wait a minute, wait a minute. 90, 10, 10%.
- [20:06]
B
That's not even 10,800.
- [20:07]
C
Yeah, so we got another 2,700 people we can offend before we need to worry about it. So that's just been a real helpful guiding principle for us.
- [20:15]
B
Yeah, I call it being intensely focused. And I think if I've learned anything at Church of the Highlands was the fact that we knew what we existed for and we were only going to do activities that we called that contributed to the vision and the mission. So we felt like the Great Commission mandate was very clear to win people to Jesus, pastor them, disciple them, and mobilize them. And every time an idea came up, we asked ourselves, will this contribute to one of those four? And if it doesn't, no matter how good it is, the answer is no. And I do think that is a tremendous trait that not only pastors need, but families need. Business leaders need to know what activities. I'm doing this study right now, David, that I heard from Kevin o' Leary about Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, about signal versus noise. And what the greatest leaders and the greatest business leaders do is they know the signal in their life. The small activities that actually contribute to the mission and vision and the noise or the distractions or the activities that either never contribute or actually take you away from mission. And the more you can clarify that, and probably, I think one of the greatest takeaways for people in this podcast from your story would be that, like, how valuable would it be to say, this is who we are, this is what we're gonna do. You know, we're gonna. You know, we're not gonna Be a buffet kind of a restaurant that has every item and none of them are good. We're gonna focus on the things that we think are really important and make that great meal, serve that incredibly well, you know.
- [21:52]
C
And Chris, I would say it's our job. Your job, my job as a senior pastor, any senior pastor, it's our job to do that. Nobody else is gonna do that as far as minding the gate or saying no to things. And, you know, my last 10 years as senior pastor at LCBC, I felt like one of the things I did more than I wanted, but it was just to say, no, we're not going to do that. And let's stay focused. And at the Global Leadership Network, we had Nick Saban speak at the summit two years ago or just last year. And one of his big things is just do the basics. And he tells everybody on his team if you just while you're there in Alabama. So you know Nick well?
- [22:26]
B
I know him well. He is one intensely focused guy. And honestly, he's.
- [22:31]
C
Everybody do their job.
- [22:31]
B
Exactly.
- [22:32]
C
And so, yeah, don't get bored. And I watch pastors get bored all the time and think they've got to try something new and just keep doing the basics again and again and God will bring success to it.
- [22:42]
B
So you and I have something in common, and that is that we both recently transitioned our churches to new leadership. Tell that story a little bit, and then tell us how the role that you stepped into with Global Leadership Summit. In fact, feel free to introduce Global Leadership Summit to this audience as well.
- [22:59]
C
Yeah, I stepped away from LCBC as the senior pastor about three years ago now, Chris. And what started my journey, I hadn't really even thinking succession, to be honest with you. And about now, 15 years ago, had opportunity to be with Jim Collins, who wrote Good to Great. He's just a business leader and sitting around a table with about 15 people. And Jim was talking. He's given his five levels of leadership, and in my mind, level five is his highest. In my mind, arrogantly, I'm thinking, well, surely I'm a level five leader. And. And as he describes a level five leader, he said, you're never a level five leader until you've actually left your organization. And you're better when you're gone than when you're there. And that wasn't the way I'd been thinking. I mean, I thought, when I step away, surely there's going to be a little bit of disruption. And people realize what a great leader I was because of that disruption. And Collins Just said, if that happens, you're not a good leader, and it needs to be stronger with you gone. So that set me on a journey to make sure that I was doing everything I could to set the church up. Well, so stepped away three years ago, and when I stepped away, we had about 22,000 people, people each weekend on 19 locations. The church has continued to grow.
- [24:02]
B
That's awesome.
- [24:02]
C
And so, like I said last weekend, over 28,000, and now we have 25 locations. So it's been real fun to watch it grow. But I will also tell you, Chris, it's not easy to watch it grow, because what surprised me more than anything in my transition was pride. And I did not think that was an issue that I would ever struggle with. And yet I would find myself thinking, okay, am I. Am I getting the recognition I think I deserve? Once I had left, do people realize I kind of laid the groundwork for these new locations? And I had to constantly. I mean, the first two years especially, just keep confessing over and over and saying, God, I'm so sorry. I'm letting pride get in the way. It's not about me. Never was about me. And so that's probably been the challenge or the surprise that I faced in that process.
- [24:43]
B
I think it's one of the greatest compliments of a leader, then of what you hand off to someone actually does continue to grow and to let the sons and daughters that you raised up, so to speak, to be even better leaders. So well done, sir. So many people are asking me and even grow leader right now, man, teach us succession, transitioning to the next generation. We're putting together materials right now to share with churches, but give me probably one of the greatest things that you learned for it to be successful. I want to add that to my list of things to share with churches.
- [25:16]
C
I mean, I'll give you a couple real quick. Yeah. I think one of them is time is either your best friend or your worst enemy.
- [25:21]
B
And what do you mean by that?
- [25:23]
C
If you wait too long to start the process, then you're going to get caught, and you won't have a whole lot of options. And so in our case, I started about 10 years before I sat down with Jason, who took my place even then and felt like he was the right guy. When I presented him to the board 10 years ago, they were like, there's no way. And they listed. I said, well, tell me why not? They listed five or six deficiencies. And so I said, well, then let's go to work on those deficiencies. And so we did. And because we had time, we were able to work through it. And so it was education, it was leadership opportunities, it was communication education skills. So by the time, seven years later, I came back to the board and said, I still think it's Jason. What do you guys think? Then they said, oh, yes, it's obviously Jason, but had I waited two years, one year before I stepped away, that wouldn't have been possible. So I think it's either time is either your best friend or your worst enemy. Secondly, I learned if you like the direction you're going, you hire internally. If you don't, you hire externally. Oh, that's good. And what I was taught, and I think what is true is if you hire externally, and you and I know the Christian world well, we're the truth. There's language that we use, but it means very different things. And you use terms in your church that if you came to lcbc, they probably mean something a little bit different in our church. And so you can, when you're in the hiring process of somebody from outside, you think you're going the same way, but they're going to change the direction of your church. And so I think the people that you need to lead your church, they're there, but you need time to develop them. And if you don't, and that's again, where time is your worst enemy. If you don't develop them, you're going to have to look outside. The direction of your church will change.
- [26:55]
B
That's so good. Tell us a little bit about Global Leadership Summit.
- [26:59]
C
Yeah. So one of the things I had opportunity to step into, what was fun for me, Chris, I really didn't know fully what I was going to step into. I knew I was going to work with pastors, and I do a thing here in Pennsylvania called the Advantage, but it wasn't keeping me real busy. And so about three or four months into my time away from the senior pastor role, Ruth, my wife, sat me down and she said, you know what? You need to go find something else to lead. And she said, and it's not me. And apparently I'd been telling her, trying to guide her at home more than she was looking for. And she said, I've been doing fine all these years. You don't need to tell me what to do. So about that time, the Global Leadership Network, I'd been on the board for a number of years, we've hosted the summit in our church for many years, was going through a leadership transition. They asked me to step in and really, the focus of the Global Leadership Network is to do everything we can to help churches thrive. So not any different than what you're doing with Grow Leader and saying, how can we help pastors thrive? How can we help churches thrive? So ultimately more people can be introduced to Jesus? And what we're really working on is saying, what can we do to help pastors create leadership cultures in their churches where they're always thinking about developing leaders and helping them grow. And that's been a real fun thing for me to be a part of. That's so good.
- [28:05]
B
That's so good. So I want to close this with something that is so incredibly obvious to me, even as I just had this conversation with you, looking at your face, looking at your attitude, looking at your. The way you phrase sentences, the positivity, the. The intense focus. Talk to us a little bit about culture. I mean, you. Obviously, I don't think any great idea survives, no matter how good the idea is, if it's planted in unfertile ground in a culture that's toxic or not spiritual or just. It just. It lacks something. It's like too many people think they call us the systems gurus. Like, bro, I'm telling you that the systems don't do anything without attitude, culture, passion, love for God, intensely loving people, Focus. Give us your biggest nugget on culture before we close.
- [29:01]
C
And Chris, I will say you guys are the experts at systems, and hats off to you for what you've built there and what you're building into churches. I have opportunity to be with pastors from all around the country and even internationally. And Church of the Highlands is the place that people are going to learn systems. It's a way to go. So it's exciting to see what you guys are doing. I appreciate you guys very much. From that standpoint, I think the simple definition of culture is it's what you allow, what you don't allow. It's what you celebrate and what you don't allow. And so again, it comes back to you saying no to the things you don't want to take place in your church. And so that means there are times you have to confront, There are times that you have to put your foot down and say, no, we're not going to do things. But it's also what you celebrate. It's the way you carry yourself. For me, I tell our staff all the time, we're going to have to work together 50, 60 hours a week. And so we might as well enjoy each other, like each other. And so it's just having those relationships. It's celebrating the wins, the right things. It's making sure you hire the right people, which is a huge one, especially smaller churches. A whole nother category, Chris, we can get into. But I watch pastors desperate to hire somebody and when you first listen to the person that they hired about them, they'll think they it's the greatest person in the world. Then a year later you go back and they're a disaster. They hired the wrong person. So I think you got to hire. Right. It's all those different kind of things.
- [30:19]
B
Well, I've very much enjoyed our conversation. I'm very excited. This year we're doing a couple of events together, including we're bringing Grow Leader to Pennsylvania for what we call it a one day, which is our two and a half day conference combined, you know, in an intensive where we give a lot of the great principles from that three day conference in a one day experience. And so we're really thrilled. I think it's at the end of April, I think it's April 30th. And so we're very excited about that. But we'll put all the details about Global Leadership Summit and the one day that we're hosting with Grow Leader because the GROW Conference this July once again is full. So if you missed it and you'd like to be a part of that, we're gonna be hosted by lcbc. We can't wait to have this joint conference together. But my friend, you've been a blessing to the body of Christ and what you've done is, it's impressive. I mean, I think what we've done here, we've done it in the heart of the Bible belt where people, you know, they were born Christians. You know, some people think, you know, everybody already kind of has a biblical worldview. But man, to do that in an area like that, hats off to you and of course, all glory to God. But man, I'm thrilled to know you. I'm thrilled to get to do some things together. So God bless you, my friend.
- [31:31]
C
Thanks, Chris. Appreciate it very much.
- [31:32]
B
Thank you.