CNLP 802 | How the Modern Church Was Shaped: Church Growth, Seeker Sensitive, Attractional, Missional with Todd Wilson

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast

Episode CNLP 802 | How the Modern Church Was Shaped: Church Growth, Seeker Sensitive, Attractional, Missional with Todd Wilson
Date: May 5, 2026
Length: ~2 hours
Host: Carey Nieuwhof
Guest: Todd Wilson

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Overview

This “seminary class you never got” is a comprehensive, two-hour journey through the last 70 years of North American church growth—from the church growth science of the 1950s to seeker, attractional, missional, and emerging church models. Host Carey Nieuwhof and guest Todd Wilson (entrepreneurial engineer, founder of Exponential, and author of "How Did We Get Here?") break down the history, dynamics, innovations, and dilemmas that now define modern church operating systems. Together, they explore what leaders have inherited, the pros and cons of different models, and what the future may hold. This episode is both an insider’s history and a practical toolkit for younger leaders inheriting systems they don’t always understand.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Origins: Donald McGavran & The Science of Church Growth (Mid-1950s)

• Roots in India: McGavran, born 1897, missionary in India, observed some churches grew rapidly while others didn't.

  • "His metric of success was not one large church, but the collective of converts across church plants." (16:47)

• Evangelistic & Reproductive: Focused on disciple-making, not building megachurches.

  • Planted 10-15 churches in India, none over 100 people.
  • “The issue is not all things that can grow can reproduce and multiply.” (05:09, Todd)

• Key Quote:

  “Why would you not want to pragmatically, if you can just tweak a few things, get better results on church growth?... Donald McGavran himself planted between 10 and 15 churches, none of which were more than 100 people.”
  —Todd Wilson [16:47]

2. The Americanization: Schuller, Hybels, and the Birth of the Seeker Movement (1970s)

• McGavran returns from India, launches Church Growth Institute in 1961 (for international missionaries).

• Fuller School of World Missions founded 1965; Peter Wagner joins.

• Shift to U.S. focus: Early 1970s, Bill Hybels and Rick Warren influenced by Robert Schuller (Crystal Cathedral, “Possibility Thinking”).

  • Schuller challenged Hybels: “Give God a thimble and He might fill it... a 55-gallon drum and you might see some really cool things happen. You gotta think really big in both a good way and a bad way.” [00:01, paraphrased by Todd]
  • This fed the faith-driven, entrepreneurial church leader ethos.

• Consumer Movement Parallels: As suburbia, TV, malls, and credit cards surged, so did consumer-friendly church models.

  • “You have this mass movement to the suburbs, television… virtually nobody has a TV [in 1950], by the time a man’s walking on the moon, just about everybody has a TV.” (32:47, Todd)

3. Seeker-Sensitive to Attractional Church: Purpose-Driven Movement (1980s–1995)

• Warren’s innovation: Made complex models simple (the baseball diamond, Saddleback Sam/Samantha). [59:46]

• Platformed by Leadership Network and Bob Buford:

  • Mentored by Peter Drucker (“Who’s the customer?”).
  • “Purpose Driven” seminars toured nationwide, fueled by Buford and Leadership Network.

• Metrics shifted: From conversion and reproduction to filling buildings and growing big single churches.

  • “Winning has become getting the most possible people to first base.” (61:28, Todd)

• Key Quote:

  “You don’t need to learn how to do [Purpose Driven]; you have to do a strategy to undo it. It is so embedded in the operating system of our churches.”
  —Todd Wilson [64:28]

4. Church Becomes an Enterprise: Leadership Culture & Big Church Phenomena (Early 1990s–2000s)

• Enterprise dynamics: Once churches exceeded 4–20 staff, they became organizationally complicated.
  • “By 1995, church is an enterprise sector.” (73:09, Todd)
• Rise of leadership/management conferences: Global Leadership Summit, John Maxwell, Ken Blanchard.
  • “You couldn’t find a job description for an executive pastor.” (79:18, Todd)
• Explosion of support industries: Capital campaigns, church design, marketing.

5. Innovation, Fracture, and Crosswinds: Multi-site, Missional, Emerging, and Attractional (1995–2005)

• Transition era: Shift from Boomer to Gen X leadership; cross-pollination via Leadership Network (and Internet).
• Missional & Emerging Church: Young Leaders Network brings together Mark Driscoll, Brian McLaren, Tony Jones, Dan Kimball, etc. (95–00).
  • Roots in Leslie Newbigin.
  • Emergent movement splinters; progressive theologies arise.
• Attractional v. Missional tension: Often positioned as antagonistic, though overlap exists.
  • “Seeker becomes attractional, while the missional/emerging movements rise in parallel.” (92:03, Todd and Carey)

6. The Digital Shift & Acceleration (2000s–Present)

• Internet, blogging, social media: Everyone can see everyone else’s model and ministry; styles and innovations spread quickly.

• Individual platform building: Shift from “radio station” to “playlist DJ” faith—followers tune in to favorite leaders, fueling both innovation and fragmentation. (103:04)

• COVID accelerant: Larger churches grow by absorbing smaller dying churches; complexity increases.

• Quote:

  “If God keeps bringing more [people] and we let our organization fall apart—and we don’t grow in leadership or management—I don’t think that’s the answer either.”
  —Carey Nieuwhof [90:04]

7. Reflection & The Future: Dilemmas and Handoffs

• Evolution, Not Revolution: Most “innovations” (multi-site, external focus, missional) are tweaks of the same inherited operating system.

  • “We are 60 years into evolutionary process, not radical revolutionary change.” (67:34, Todd)

• Current dilemma: How do younger leaders inherit, adapt, or dismantle systems built for previous eras?

  • “What we have to recognize is the shadow effect that happens from the definition [of] success being bigger and bigger.”

• Disruption Era (2015–2025): Deconstruction, platformed individualism, theological fissures, digitization.

• Next wave: Unclear—Gen Z & Alpha face a landscape of fragmentation, but also opportunity for “revolutionary” change.

  • “We still have the inheritors controlling influence… the issue is going to be equipping and giving permission to the next generation for new wine in new wine skins.” (108:33, Todd)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“My mom’s best friend says to my mom, ‘There’s this new church at the movie theater. It’s different than normal church. You’ve got to bring your kids…’ We got back in the car… I said, ‘I’m not sure exactly what that was, but that wasn’t church.’”
—Todd Wilson [28:20]

“A dilemma is something—it can be good—is it this or is it this? … We literally have a history in this modern church growth movement where well-intentioned people were faced with decisions they can’t always control what’s going to come after them.”
—Todd Wilson [64:57]

“We’ve changed, we painted the car a different color, [put] new wheels on. But it’s still the same car.”
—Carrie Nieuwhof [67:25]

“You can fight it, or you can fund it… You can fight [the next generation] or you can fuel it.”
—Carey Nieuwhof [118:01]

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Important Timestamps

• 03:02 — Todd’s two-year deep dive into church growth history
• 11:42 — “How did we get here?”—naming the big question
• 16:47 — The original church growth metric: not big churches, but reproducing churches
• 22:07 — John Wimber, Carl George, and the Fuller era
• 23:53 — The rise of Hybels, Schuller, and the seeker movement
• 30:45 — Robert Schuller, possibility thinking, and generational shifts
• 36:41 — Late 70s/80s: Apostolic, entrepreneurial church leaders emerge
• 40:28–42:20 — Purpose Driven approach explodes; “megachurch” defined as 1000
• 44:38 — Peter Drucker’s journey and indirect impact on church growth
• 48:21 — Fax machines and the infancy of Leadership Network
• 54:21 — The birth of the church growth “industry”: consulting, capital campaigns, etc.
• 57:52 — Purpose Driven Church as universal operating system
• 73:09 — “Church as enterprise”: leadership/management era dawns (mid-90s onward)
• 90:57 — Transition from seeker sensitive to attractional, missional, and emerging
• 96:14–96:54 — Leadership Network’s Young Leaders cohort: Driscoll, McLaren, Padgett, Kimball, etc.
• 103:04 — Internet as accelerator: “playlist DJ” era of ministry
• 105:50 — Fracture and the question of whether evangelical unity can be restored
• 112:01 — “What does gospel saturation actually look like for the next generation?”
• 119:10 — Book available: church-growth.org, plans for a Wiki-like living document

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Takeaways for Leaders

For younger leaders:

• Most modern churches operate in legacy systems inherited from 70 years of incremental change.
• Understanding the evolutionary path helps diagnose current frustrations and anticipate next steps.
• Models like Purpose Driven are so foundational, their DNA persists even in congregations that reject “seeker sensitive” language.
• The future may require revolutionary innovations—especially in disciple-making, accountability, and redefining impact—not just tweaks.

For all leaders:

• The shift from mission-based organizations to enterprise-level churches brings unintended consequences—leadership demands, management complexity, and shadow sides.
• Fragmentation and disruption (digitization, individualism, deconstruction, social change) are both challenge and opportunity.
• Gospel saturation rooted in generational disciple-making, not just attendance or size, should be the true premium.
• Boomers and Gen X can “fund instead of fight,” mentoring and resourcing the rising generations.

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Further Resources

• Church-Growth.org: Todd Wilson’s book and living history wiki
• careynieuwhof.com: Show notes and more leadership resources

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Summary Table: Church Growth Timeline

| Era | Key Leaders | Defining Features | Key Tensions / Innovations | |----------------------|-----------------------------|-----------------------------------------------------|-----------------------------------------------| | 1950s–mid 1960s | Donald McGavran, Peter Wagner| Church Growth Science, reproducibility, evangelism | Metric: conversions/reproduction, not size | | 1970s | Bill Hybels, Robert Schuller, Rick Warren | Americanization, Seeker Sensitive, Possibility Thinking | Consumer culture meets church | | 1980s–mid 1990s | Rick Warren, John Maxwell, Bob Buford | Purpose Driven, Megachurch explosion, Leadership focus | Shift: Mission → Enterprise; leadership/management gap| | 1995–2005 | Driscoll, McLaren, Kimball, Leadership Network Young Leaders| Missional/Emerging, Attractional; Internet birth | Progressivism, deconstruction, cross-pollination | | 2005–2025 | Multi-site, Platformed voices| Disruption Era: social/digital fracture, COVID | Fragments, individualized ministry | | Present/Future | Gen Z, Gen Alpha | Inheritance dilemma, call for revolutionary change | Gospel saturation, disciple-making |

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End of Summary.

Transcript

[Todd Wilson]

The Art of Leadership Network, in Hybel's words. I mean, he's just a young kid. We don't have any money. And he went out and they visited Schuler and Schuler let him come up to the office and they had a conversation where I'm going to paraphrase here. But Schuler basically said to him, give God a thimble and he might fill it. Give God a five gallon bucket and he might fill that. You've got a 55 gallon drum and you might see some really cool things happen. And it was Schuler who challenged Hybels. Think big. You gotta think really big in both a good way and a bad way. Now, Kerry,

[Carrie Newhoff]

Welcome to the Carey Newhoff leadership podcast. Man, I'm so excited about this episode. Okay. It's a little bit nerdy and I think that's okay because when I talk to Todd Wilson project he's been working on for years, I'm like, where was this when I needed it? It's the history of the church growth movement over the last 70 years. You know, from its origins to seeker, sensitive, attractional, missional, emerging church. I mean, the whole thing over the last 70 years and why this is so important to me is this is basically the church you ended up leading. I picked up with this in the 90s midstream. You probably picked up on it, you know, a lot later than I did. You got into church leadership in the2010 or even in the2020s, and you don't fully understand the model that you're operating in. Well, we go two hours on this. So I take my church history nerd hat and consider this the seminary class you never got. Okay, Todd Wilson is with me. He is an entrepreneurial engineer who has spent more than two decades helping to shape the modern church in North America. He's founded or co founded several influential organizations including Exponential Passion for Planting and Multipliers, has written numerous books and his latest is what we explore right now. So you might want to take your whole team through this. I know it's two hours, but I really enjoyed this. And we talk about the pros and the cons of large churches, church growth, what's positive about the model, what's negative about the model, all the different phases. And at the end, it's sort of like that map you come to in the subway or in a city. It's like you are here. This shows you how you got here. So I hope you enjoy as much as I do this episode of the Podcast with Todd Wilson. Todd, you have come out of a rabbit hole that you've been in for how long now to give us a definitive history of the church growth movement, which I am so grateful for, man. Tell us. Like, there is no book that I'm aware of like this that you just wrote. And you've been away from friends and family and sunlight for how long to do this project?

[Todd Wilson]

It's not been full time, But I've spent two years on this project, Carrie. It's over 100 hours of interviews with people. I mean, it's been a massive project.

[Carrie Newhoff]

What's. What made you. Because I was saying to. To you before we started recording, like, I grew up in a Christian family, reading the Bible, all that kind of stuff. But it was really when I went to seminary for the first time because I kind of knew Moses, Noah, David, the prophets, Isaiah, but I didn't know the order. And when I took my first Old Testament survey course, just Intro to OT at seminary, that's when I'm like, oh, no, it was before Abraham, was before Moses. And this connected. And then they were here and then they were there. Like, the whole story made sense.

[Todd Wilson]

And.

[Carrie Newhoff]

And I feel like you have taken in this project all these little names and ideas and movements and points in time that I was vaguely aware of or specifically aware of, and connected them together in a way that helps me understand church growth and honestly, what I do. Because sometimes people say, well, you're the church growth guy. I'm like, yeah, I think every pastor. My theory is every pastor wants their church to grow. I don't know anybody who wants to close a church. If you do, I don't know what's wrong with you, and I don't know how to help you. But to see this over 70 years has just been life giving to me. So how did it come about? Todd?

[Todd Wilson]

Yeah. And Carrie. There were a couple of converging paths. It was not some grandmaster strategic plan in my life to do. It was a little bit by accident. And a couple of things converged. A lot of people talk about getting the argument of church health and church growth and healthy things grow or don't grow. And my framework comes a little bit different, having spent the last 20 years in the church planting and multiplication space, which is more, you know, growth is an important thing. Who doesn't want to grow? If you can grow, like, of course you want to grow. The issue is not all things that can grow can reproduce and multiply.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Right. And that's exponential your time with them, background with Exponential.

[Todd Wilson]

And the founder, co founder there. And so I came in, my first ones coming in was the burden that we have an operating system in the church today that that is optimized for growth and there's a lot of good things about that, but it's not capable of reproduction in biblical multiplication. And I've given my life to the mission of the church. Planting and multiplication piece. So I started writing a different book than this one, which as an engineer was. Everybody talks about models, but what we never talk about is the underlying operating system.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Okay. I remember those texts from a couple years ago where you're like, I want to write a book about the church os I, I, I'll be honest with you publicly, I never quite understood what you were talking about, but I'm just like, yeah, Todd, way to go, man.

[Todd Wilson]

That was a couple of years ago, Carrie, and I, I was 50% of the way through that book. I mean that in that book I

[Carrie Newhoff]

think you sent me fragments of it.

[Todd Wilson]

Yeah, right. And that book was simply dissecting our current church operating system, what I call the consumer driven operating system to just help expose and help people shake their head. Yes, yes, that's. Oh, I get it, I get it, I get it. And as I was doing that, we had about 50% finished with the book and it started feeling heavy and I thought, all right, I need to stick in a rah rah chapter on the history of the church growth movement. Like, I'm going to stick a chapter in the middle of this heavy book that really celebrates how eternity is different because of the modern church growth movement. And I just assumed with my background growing up in the seeker era and then going into full time ministry and being part of all the different things. Oh, this will take me a week or two and I'll have that chapter done and on, you know, back into the book again. And Carrie, it's like my eyes were open. I really thought I understood it all. And as I started writing, what was supposed to be one chapter became the length of two, and then three and four and five and before you knew it, I'm almost broaching into an actual full length book as I'm starting to write. And as that happened and I'm talking to other people about the book, I started to realize when I talk to younger leaders, they'd be like, oh, purpose driven. Yeah, I've heard of that baseball diamond thing. Like there were some bases. I don't really know what that is. And I'm realizing there's an entire generation of leaders right now that some of the things that us older builders take for, you know, take for granted. The emerging generation doesn't know what it. Not even where.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Yeah, they sometimes weren't born, they weren't. Saddleback was doing that stuff.

[Todd Wilson]

Saddleback, Sam and Samantha, like yeah, that's a nice acronym for something.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Well the other thing that's true Todd is like in my experience a lot of people don't like if you say church growth there's an immediate suspicion. There's an immediate like oh, I don't think that's good. I don't think that's healthy. We don't need, you know, cancers grow. That's what people get. So the whole church growth movement, at least in a lot of the conversations I have, sort of has that hermeneutic of suspicion that like eh, we don't really do it. And yet here's the reality. Anytime I post something about how your church should grow, people eat it up. They love it. Like again nobody wants their church to fail. But the church growth movement sort of had a moment and then everyone's like ah, seeker sensitive. Ah, seeker targeted. Ah, now it's attractional, like that's all garbage and we're blazing a trail that nobody is, has blazed. But what I love about your project is I think it gives us another take to appreciate how we got here and maybe it wasn't all terrible.

[Todd Wilson]

Oh that's right Kerry, it's, I mean we have to celebrate it. I wouldn't be talking to you right now if it weren't for the, the modern church growth movement. I became a Christian through it and served through it. So I, I mean I attribute it to my salvation, family members salvation, my kids salvation. I mean I, on one hand it's we got to celebrate it and on the other hand there are realities with now I'm going to go to the operating system part of it. Yeah. What started out in 1955 with Donald McGavran as a set of ideals in church growth science, not movement but in church growth science ended up over the next 30, 40, 50 years getting co opted into something in my opinion on looking at all this history that is different than what he started out with. We co opted it into something else. And, and so one quick thing, when we say church growth movement, one of the things that was an eye opener to me. I've always just lumped everything I've experienced into the idea of church growth movement. But in reality if we lined up 10 different people right now, I think we would all have different definitions Even of what the church. Church growth movement is of. It fits into history and maybe not

[Carrie Newhoff]

even sure what it is, right? Yeah, I think that's right. So, you know, we do have a lot of young leaders listening for whom this is going to be new. They don't remember, you know, Willow Creek, Saddleback, the early days of Life Church, North Point, or going back even earlier than that, some other churches and other ministries. And as you say, this kind of goes back to the mid-1950s with a guy named Donald McGaveran. And he started because, ironically, I didn't know this, didn't know much about him. Your book really helped me. But it came out of, like, India and a mission program to try to evangelize India, this whole church growth thing. So let's go back to the roots. And this is not like everybody got Eastern spirituality. This is a very different. Like Lesnie Newbiggin. Right. He cut his teeth on the mission field in India, too. So let's go there and just help people understand because literally and just. I'm going to frame this one more time, and then I'm going to shut up. Your church is a product of what we're going to talk about in this episode, 100%. If you're evangelical, you care about reaching people, you're somewhere in the west and particularly in the US where most of our audience is. You have been impacted by what we're going to talk about. And understanding it is going to make you a better leader.

[Todd Wilson]

And I would amplify. Carrie, you know, one of the top questions people are asking is why the book's named the way it is. How did we get here? Yeah, some people are asking that question cynically. How in the world did we get here with all this division and all this chaos? And others are asking it innocently, hey, how did we get here? Like, I really don't know how we got here. And either path, it's important to go back. I mean, if we want to in some ways shape the future, we do need to go back and look at how in the world did we get where we're at. And it was an eye opener for me. I thought I knew a lot more than I did going back. Donald McGaveran. I'm going to give some encouragement generationally here. First. Donald McGaveran was born in 1897.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Wow.

[Todd Wilson]

Part of the Lost Generation. When was the last time you talked in one of your episodes about someone from The Lost Generation?

[Carrie Newhoff]

Gary 799 episodes in, and I think this is the first time.

[Todd Wilson]

So here's the encouragement. Donald McGavren, who would be considered the father of what is now shaping all of our churches, born in 1897. At age 61, he came. Or, I'm sorry, at age 64, in. In 1961, he came off the mission field back to the US to start a Church Growth Institute to help international missionaries do better in church growth science. So let's just pause right there. He's. He's a year or two away from retirement. He's already come off the mission field when he's catalyzing what he's about to do. That's 1961. By 1965, Fuller wanted to start their School of World Missions. And he had such a good reputation, they recruited Donald McGavran to be the founding dean of the. Of the School of World Missions, and he moved the Church Growth Institute then to Fuller in 1965. So if we just start in that time period, like 1955 to 1965, Donald McGaveran had spent a good chunk of his life on the mission field in India. And. And in the 40s into the 50s, a study had been done by someone else that looked at all the provenances in India, and it. It looked at why some of the churches were growing and some weren't. In some cases, churches that were just a mile or two apart from one another, you'd have one that was growing really fast and one that wasn't. And so McGavern, as a life planner now, I do a lot of life planning. I'd say his captivating moment was on the mission field, reading that study and realizing, oh, my goodness, there's a science to this. There are some things you can prag.

[Carrie Newhoff]

He saw the patterns.

[Todd Wilson]

Saw the patterns, yeah. And realized why in the world put on the stewardship hat. Why would you not want to pragmatically, if you can just tweak a few things, you know, get better results on church growth. Now what. What's really important to know in classic, McGaveran is very evangelistically driven. Like he's an evangelist.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Wanted to reach people, his life to it in India, his life to share the gospel.

[Todd Wilson]

There's a burden for it, and at its core is disciple making. It's not a programmatic approach. It's not a Sunday century. If you take. Just think of the formula of success in the US Church right now. That's not the formula that he was looking at in 1961 when he's bringing these principles into the founding of the Church Growth Institute. I'm talking the practices now, not the heart of the ideals.

[Carrie Newhoff]

This episode is brought to you by my Art of Leadership Academy. If you want a proven way to grow as a leader in just five minutes a day, listen up. Inside the Art of Leadership Academy, you'll find bite sized tools, weekly conversations, and leaders who are actually walking the same walk you're on. And if you're like most leaders these days, here's what you don't need. You don't need more content. You don't even need more ideas for faster growth. You need people to help you find the right insight at just the right time, the right strategy and the right skills and put it into action. When you join the Academy, you'll also get exclusive access to the show notes for every episode of this podcast and a very safe, encouraging place to discuss it. Actually discuss it, not just drop a comment with other church leaders and also with me. So to get started, create a free account. You can get started in minutes and see what a difference it makes. All you have to do is click the link in the description of this episode or visit theartofleadershipacademy.com or I look forward to seeing you inside. Well, let's talk about that. What are some of the differences? What are the assumptions now? And his assumptions? Because I think that's going to be really good because it did morph over the decades.

[Todd Wilson]

Yeah. And the morphing, what I'm getting ready to bring up, I think is really at the heart of the morphing is it's important to note that when Donald McGaveran talked church growth, his metric of success was not one large church, or what we would call the large church phenomena. He was looking at the collective of converts across church plants and church planting. How do we, how do we reproduce, reproduce, reproduce? And so what's important to know is Donald McGaver himself planted between 10 and 15 churches, none of which were more than 100 people. Interesting. Yeah, Let it sink in. The father of the modern church growth movement planted 10 to 15 churches, none of which were over a hundred people. And, and so your question, what's different measure of success is different. His success was not how do we grow really big churches. It wasn't his metric. It wasn't what he was after. His metric was how do we make con. Make disciples who make disciples that plant churches, that plant churches and they reproduce like rabbits. And it's the church growth means the collective, if you want to use attendance, the collective attendance of the kingdom, not the collective attendance of One church.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Right. He's not like building projects, multisite, all of that. That was all decades to come down the road, but wasn't how big can my church get? But how big can the church get through the making of disciples.

[Todd Wilson]

Right. So when he. I mean, at the heart of that was a disciple, generational disciple making. And when he came back to the US and started the Church Growth Institute in 1961, he didn't want to train US pastors. In fact, he wouldn't. He was only training international missionaries and not US pastors. And so he spent four or five years really looking harder at, I'm going to call it the Church Growth science. Like, what's the science of how you do better at growing? And really, when I say growing, it would almost be better to say conversions. Like, he really was not a fan of transfer growth and what he called organic growth, which is just, you know, bearing children into the family. It was right. You know, he really wanted to make new disciples. So from 61 to 65, he trained a number of international missionaries, then went to the School of World Missions. And where we really see the starting, what I'd call the Americanization of the Church growth movement is after he gets to Fuller and starts building his team there. Peter Wagner is one of his first recruits to come off the mission field to be with him at Fuller.

[Carrie Newhoff]

And I remember that name. I mean, I started in the 90s in church ministry, church leadership, and I didn't know much about him, but I remembered that name. And this is the fun part of it. So pick that up. He was a young student.

[Todd Wilson]

Yep. So, yeah, Wagner comes back and starts working, you know, in the very early days now, and we've not yet really got the American church growth thing going yet. And a couple of us pastors started asking, why can't we have a class? Why can't we have a class? So right near Fuller, Wagner convinced McGavin that they ought to run a class for U.S. pastors on church growth. This is 1971 now, and so they go to run that class, and it turns out by God's providence, in that class is a leader named Win Arm. And Win was a marketplace guy who had worked in the denomination, was an evangelist, and was getting fed up with frustrated by evangelism in the local church and decided to jump into this course. Well, he's a media guy doing filmmaking and graphic media. And so during the class, when army starts making multimedia props, and the rest of the class loves it, they want to purchase kits like, you should start Making kits out of these and out of that class in 1971, when Arn started it, really what I'd say was the putting legs to the church growth movement. A non profit on, you know, church growth ministry. And he started traveling the country in a crazy way. I mean, I'm talking training thousands of people and traveling across. And that's when you start getting denominational interest and you start seeing denominations adding church growth specialists. And it starts right in that 71 to 72 window to just quickly get traction. So much so that McGovern and Wagner thought we need to start a church growth. A department of Church growth now at. At Fuller.

[Carrie Newhoff]

So under the Fuller Theological Seminary. Yeah.

[Todd Wilson]

Right. So at Fuller, the founding dean will be another name, you know, of the church growth department. John Wimber. Yeah, yeah.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Vineyard, like huge.

[Todd Wilson]

An anchor church. And be part of the Vineyard movement. And then. And then after him was Carl George. So you get a bunch of these, you know, legendary.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Carl George has been on this podcast hundreds of episodes ago, along with Warren Bird.

[Todd Wilson]

Yep. And he.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Back when we were audio only.

[Todd Wilson]

Yeah. I did about 15 hours of interviews with Carl for this book. I mean, just that kind of going back to get the history. But notably in that 71 to 75 time period, Carrie, a young kid named Bill Hybels, pursuing a business career and a business family, has a youth ministry in the suburbs of Chicago and it starts taking off. And so that leads us in. I mean, there's a whole story then as the. Right at the timing of the Americanization of the church growth movement coming off of the ideals. You've got Hybels on the ground having this crazy good youth thing going on. Look what else is happening. Time magazine, twice in 1970-72, puts God on the COVID This movement. And what's happening with evangelism across the country with the, you know, you can call it a fresh wind of the spirit happening. Yeah. So you've got the combination of McGaveran and what he's doing at Fuller, the Jesus movement happening. And then you've got Hybels on the ground as a very clear practitioner. And really his mentor is Robert Shuler. And a lot of people, Crystal Cathedral guy, a lot of people don't realize the impact that Robert Schuller then had on accelerating and impacting high volts. But that enters us into the seeker. I mean, really what we'd call the seeker sensitive movement in the 70s.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Yeah. And I want to just put an editorial note here. We have talked about moral failure dozens. If not hundreds of times on this podcast, we have looked at the Willow Creek association or Willow Creek Church Moral failure, Hybel's fall from leadership. That is not so. If you want that, go into the archive. There's lots of material there talking about it. We're not taking that angle. This is just. This is what happened. And younger leaders today, particularly Gen Z and younger millennial leaders probably don't know the way you or I appreciated at our stage how influential Willow was, how influential you know you're gonna get to him. But Saddleback was. Cause around that time, Rick was thinking about Rick Warren was thinking about planting a church. And all this stuff has its genesis in like the 1970s. And there was the Jesus Revolution film, which talked about the Jesus movement. So all this stuff is in the mix, so to speak, within a five to seven year window of it. And it births all the stuff that we are still seeing today and experiencing today, whether you realize it or not.

[Todd Wilson]

And on the positive side, Carrie, the core common theme of all those things is an evangelistic zeal. I mean, it's saved, right? I mean, every interview I did of anybody back in that time period, it was the evangelistic part of it that was drawing them in and engaging them.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Mm, okay. So pick it up. I just wanted to put that note in there before people are like, wait a minute. So it's a different purpose today.

[Todd Wilson]

This is how I would introduce, especially for the younger people, that they've heard of the seeker sensitive movement. Maybe have negative impressions of it.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Exactly. Most of them would.

[Todd Wilson]

This is where I'll make it personal. I was not a Christian in when Highball started. I was in high school. I actually lived in the community where Willow Creek movie theater was. And so we're in the suburbs. And if you think about the approach that Schuler and Hybels and Warren took, and they were all related, it was very much, I'm going to use the word customer consumer oriented, meaning in a good way. They went and did surveys in neighborhoods. They'd go, Warren talk. Rick talks about all, you know, his story of going door to door to every household in Saddleback Valley to interview them about what they needed in church and what their needs were. And that was a common denominator between Schuller, Peibels and Warren in the 70s is they are really trying to understand the felt needs of who they're going to be reaching. And therefore, how do we do church in a way to draw them in on those felt needs. That's where you get the seeker Name even is we're going to find the seekers, people who are open to spirituality. Now, let's make sure we understand them in a way that we can draw them in.

[Carrie Newhoff]

I mean, we're still talking about the same thing. We just don't use the language. We talk about people who are spiritually open, people who are spiritually curious, people who are spiritual but not religious or Christian, and we just change the nomenclature. And, you know, to that end, it was funny when you were talking about the fruit of that ministry. There is a temptation to look back from what we know now, so to speak, in air quotes, and look back on everything in the past as having been dumb and those people didn't know what they were doing. But guess what? We have it all figured out. And our kids will look back on us and go, well, actually. But Lee Strobel's been on the podcast at least once, maybe twice. And I had breakfast with him and Mark Middleburg a couple months ago when I think I was in Denver. And this is a guy who literally got saved in the early days of Willow Creek. We were chatting at breakfast about his conversion. He was working as a legal editor for the Chicago Tribune, total atheist. His wife started going. He was opposed to it. He was drinking too much. He was all those things. And his life got turned around. And he's now, I think, in his 70s and loves Jesus, is sharing the gospel, is making an impact. So, yeah, there were some mistakes of that movement and some dark sides of that, but there's also fruit that endures to this day.

[Todd Wilson]

And personally, Carrie, living there in the community where Willow Creek was, I was in high school. We're not a Christian family. And. And this is the heart of the seeker approach. My mom's best friend says to my mom, there's this new church at the movie theater. It's different than normal church. You've got to bring your kids and come see this church. And here's what I remember. Carrie having not been in church much at that point. Point. We got back in the car in the parking lot after church and. And. And before I tell you what, I said it. Yeah, it. It was drums and drama, and it was an experience. Oh, yeah, it was an experience. And we got in the car and. And my mom said to us kids, well, what y' all think of church? And my answer was, I'm not sure exactly what that was, but that wasn't church. Now, this is coming from a non Christian telling somebody, I'm not sure what church is, but that's not church. And you know what? The door opening, that safety of drawing people in is a strength of what was going on, and we need to celebrate that strength. There's a lot of people in eternity because of that approach.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Well, and we were also seeing, I mean, in North America at the time, Christianity had sort of peaked out in the 50s with attendance, and a lot of that was nominal. And I get it. And then the 60s were a very huge change decade. Church attendance was already starting to decline. And this new generation came up in the 70s and kind of looked at the model of church and looked at their, quote, parents who were running it and said, we can take the gospel and do this differently. Okay, pick up the narrative from there. This is a fun, fun. I love this stuff. I guess I studied history too long in school.

[Todd Wilson]

You said, I love this historian. So there you go.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Well, I'm not a historian. I. I have a degree in history and political science, so I love this stuff. I'm a nerd.

[Todd Wilson]

So middle 70s. If we really look what's happening now as the seeker movement's getting going, I. I didn't give enough credit. Didn't even understand the role Robert Schuller was playing in this until doing this book. Robert Schuller, you know, from the Crystal Cathedral, he had written a book called Possibility Thinking.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Yeah.

[Todd Wilson]

And let me do the generational thing for you. We've got McGavran as the lost generation, born in 1897. Now we run into our. And now we're into our next influential person in what we're calling this Arab church growth thing, which is Schuler. And Schuler's part of the greatest generation. So he's the next generation. And to encourage folks, it's boomers who actually built the movement, but we actually have three generations earlier than the boomers that poured the gas on what was going to happen in the building.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Yeah, they were making the way for the next generation.

[Todd Wilson]

Making the way for the next generation.

[Carrie Newhoff]

And it's so. It's so funny. You know, this. Just a little footnote. Since the time I finished reading your book. Bill Gurley, the legendary silicon investor, Silicon Valley investor, is coming on the show as a podcast, might be. Or as a guest, might be aired by the time we air this. I never know how it all works, but I'm reading his book and I'm looking through his bibliography, and you know who he referenced? This is, as far as I know, a secular guy. I'm not sure that he's a Christian. I'll find out when I interview him. But I mean, had a fascinating career. Among all the books, he lists one of Robert Schuller's books. Interesting. Along with Dale Carnegie and so on. I'm like, okay, that's interesting because, I mean, the Crystal Cathedral's been closed for years. Decades, but. Right.

[Todd Wilson]

Well, that chain is interesting because Schuller was impacted by Carnegie. And then Schuller is the one with his possibility thinking. Here's the way to put his possibility thinking. Thinking outside the box. How do we think more outside the box about things? And we have to look what's going on in the 70s. We call this the church growth movement. But 60s and 70s, the really big thing going on in the country is the consumer movement. You have after the war, the move to suburbia. I mean, really, you could say suburbia was invented in the 60s and 70s.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Yeah, malls were pretty new by in the 60s and 70s. That was new.

[Todd Wilson]

So you have this mass movement to the suburbs, television. If you look in 1950 compared to 1960, that's a movement by itself. Virtually nobody has a TV. And by the time a man's walking on the moon, just about Everybody has a TV in 1955, there's no credit cards. And 20 years later, you got credit card debt and stuff going on. When you look at the things that impact consumers, it's really what's going on in the time period that we're talking about is how consumer things are impacting things. So now along comes Schuler, and look what his messaging is. We got to think outside the box. Crystal Cathedral. What is that? His first thing was a drive in movie theater. They were doing church and drive in movie theater.

[Carrie Newhoff]

That's right.

[Todd Wilson]

And then out of that comes the Crystal Cathedral. But really the modern area of marketing, much of it came to be both with the consumer movement and all the marketing techniques. But now we can leverage those things into the church. Starting to get this combination of secular things that we haven't necessarily had in the church much. And now they're starting to come to bear through the consumer part of what's going on, whether it's marketing, whether it's the modern leadership, things big buildings like what we're talking about. You know, a whole range of things are emerging. But Schuler is the one, according to Hybels himself, that when Hybels was young, here we're coming up on 1980. Now, when things have taken off for Willow and they need to do their first building to get out of the movie theater, and they're trying to figure out what they're going to do. And in Heibel's words, I mean, he's just a young kid, we don't have any money. And he went out and they visited Schuler and Schuler let him come up to the office and they had a conversation where I'm going to paraphrase here. But Schuler basically said to him, give God a thimble and he might fill it. Give God a five gallon bucket and he might fill that. Give God a 55 gallon drum and you might see some really cool things happen. And it was Schuller who challenged Hybel's Think big. You got to think really big in both a good way and a bad way. Now, Kerry, this think big, this is where we start to move now early in the Americanization from what I would call gospel saturation as an end scope for McGaveran. He's wanting to see geography saturated by disciple making and planting. And now we've got this very clear, iconic, you know, five, a thimble to a five gallon drum to a 55 gallon drum, which is go buy that 90 acres and build your building. You know, if you give God, hold it out yet. And this is where that was a hard one for me, Carrie. It's like, what would I do if I was in high bullshit? I mean that's like a faith. Like what you going to put in front of God? Are you going to put a small vision or a big vision in front of God? And really, if you think about what's starting to emerge right now in the late 70s into the 80s, I'm going to call it an apostolic pioneering, call it the church entrepreneur. Like it's you. And that's who Schuler is really. If, if, if, if you're a church minded entrepreneur, when Shuler is doing what he's doing, you're going to be attracted to it. And we're starting now in the late 70s and early 80s to see entrepreneurial church leaders being mobilized in a new way.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Yeah, and that was kind of new, wasn't it?

[Todd Wilson]

Well, in fact, you know, if you look at that point, what we would call a megachurch, by most of the data that's done by 1980, there's less than 50 megachurches in America.

[Carrie Newhoff]

This episode is brought to you by Church Growth Engine. So if you're like most pastors listening right now, you want your church to thrive, but you're drowning in strategies that don't fit your context. Maybe you've tried the latest programs and you've read the books and you've attended the conferences. But here's what's missing. A weekly pulse on what's actually working in churches like yours right now. Church Growth Engine delivers research backed strategies straight into your inbox and every Tuesday morning. No fluff, no theory, just practical insights you can scan in five minutes and implement this week. Whether you lead 50 people or 500. They cover why churches growing 5% annually measure engagement over attendance. How one pastor doubled visitor retention with immediate texting. And the surprising Jesus resurgence happening outside of church walls. So you can join over 1000 pastors who are building thriving churches without the overwhelm. Subscribe for [e-mail] that's churchgrowengine.com I remember talking to Gordon McDonald about leading. I think it was Grace Chapel in New England in the 70s and they had gone past a thousand people. And I remember him telling me we didn't have a category for that. Like very few churches in the history of America had gotten that large and there were not many in the 70s and then of course the 80s and 90s and where we are today. And this is groundbreaking. And before people kind of. I'll insert occasional editorial comments here, Todd, before people jump all over. Well, consumer Christianity is a problem, et cetera. Well, have you deleted your Amazon account? How often are you on that? And then you're really trying to grow your followers on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube and all of that. Guess what that is. It's the same thing. It's just got a new form. So anyway, let's pick up the story. So this is all we got. Spiritual entrepreneurs where the time.

[Todd Wilson]

This is where the timeline really started getting intriguing and exciting for me. Like going into that 1980-85 window. Yeah. Because if we, if we just take a pause for a second, you've got. We're 25 years into McGavran, from 55 to 1980.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Yeah.

[Todd Wilson]

And you've had him only wanting international. It moves to us. It's starting to. The ideals are spreading now you're getting practitioners on the ground with people like Hybels and then Warren and. And you're starting to see this intrigue. I'm going to call it apostolically or entrepreneurially. Wow. This big thing, something we could go after. I mean it's. If you want to call up the scorecard, there's a shifting of scorecard that we don't have to think small. If you go back to Shuler's words, think outside the box Possibility thinking, think big. And if there is a co opting that's going on in a positive way, the scorecard is changing from thinking small to thinking big. The challenge is McGavern's original ideals were thinking big, but through saturation, just not through one.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Right. Not a big 90 acre campus. It's like your church of 100 will go out and you'll make disciples and you'll plant more churches and they'll plant churches sort of back to your exponentials like multiplying movement. But it became, well, supermarkets were getting bigger, there was a concentration of the market. All of those things were happening at the same time and it impacted the church.

[Todd Wilson]

Well, here's what's fun in the story. So we're, we're coming into the 80s now. Warren has started Saddleback, Fuller, Fuller Evangelistic association starts doing church planting and other church growth conferences that in my interviews, it's amazing how many, you know, founding pastors of a bunch of our mega churches right now. That's how they were equipped in the 80s. If you.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Oh they went to like before my time. They were at some of those Fuller seminars and conferences.

[Todd Wilson]

That's exactly right.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Okay.

[Todd Wilson]

Doug Slaybaugh, who helped start Purpose Driven for Rick and yeah worked with me, with Bob Buford. Doug was the director of those Fuller conferences in the 80s. So I interviewed him, he told me it was amazing in the early 80s, in that mid 80 time period they would hold these classes and he said, I remember the first time we had Rick Warren speak at one. He said, I didn't know him until then, he was just a young kid. He had just started Saddleback and people were outside, I mean they were overflowing outside his classroom as he's teaching the principles of, you know, here's this young 20 something kid that's teaching the principles of how he's grown, how he's grown a church to three or four hundred people.

[Carrie Newhoff]

That was a thing, man. I mean when I started in ministry, if you had a church of 400 that was like, oh wow, I gotta get coffee with you.

[Todd Wilson]

And that's what they, what they would do is bring people in who had grown churches to three or four or 500. We're not even yet in the very early 80s necessarily thinking how do we platform churches of thousands? Because there aren't any to hardly any to platform. We're still down in the units of hundreds. In fact, the original definition of a megachurch was a thousand.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Yeah. Because it was so rare.

[Todd Wilson]

It was so rare. We're still down on the small end. So here's where it starts to get a little more personal for me is is where Bob Buford enters the story. So Bob was a business owned a private cable company. Bob was personally mentored by Peter Drucker, the father of modern management who a

[Carrie Newhoff]

lot of people might not know I know of. We've had Jim Collins on. He was heavily influenced by Peter Drucker and again before my time. But like a legendary business leader for my parents generation and a little bit younger.

[Todd Wilson]

And the average person in church right now does not understand the significance of how Peter Drucker has impacted their church today.

[Carrie Newhoff]

So let's do a quick wiki on Peter Drucker. Who was he? Why was he significant? And we'll get to Bob.

[Todd Wilson]

It's a fascinating story. So Peter is also in that greatest generation born in the. In 19, I think 1900 plus or minus a year or two. He's right there at the beginning of the greatest generation born in Austria. He's I like to say there were four seasons to his life. He initially was in a political journalist, writer in politics wanting to cover things. He wrote some very confront controversial things about Hitler because he was really against what was happening to the point that his papers got burned, some of the stuff he did and he had to flee. So he left what he was doing there, came to America and he. His whole thing at that point was I call it the mantra never again. We've got to create a functioning society where what happened with Hitler can never happen again. He had concluded the problem wasn't Hitler. The problem was the culture in which Hitler could do what Hitler did. And so Drucker's kind of life purpose at that point became how do we find the secret to a functioning society, healthy society where you can't have things happen like what happened with Hitler. And his first thought when he came to America was that'll be through big business. It's got to be business that's got to be the one to do it in America.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Interesting.

[Todd Wilson]

In that second phase of his life, I think it was a Howard whoever the president of GM was which was the largest corporation in the world at the time, he ends up getting their agreement to do a management study of their operations. He got an internal look at General Motors and out of that became the top like management guru. He's considered the father of modern management actually like he wrote he's. I think he ended up writing 40 some books and just very, very strong. But eventually he became very disillusioned on the business side the greed. I mean, he just felt like, okay, this isn't the answer to never again. Businesses aren't going to be the ones to solve it. So then he focused on nonprofits. Okay, it's got to be the nonprofit sector. And he did a lot of good work, wrote a book in the nonprofit sector. Now enter Bob Buford, Christian business guy. Bob owns a large cable company, made

[Carrie Newhoff]

a lot of money.

[Todd Wilson]

Made a lot of money and decided he wanted to, you know, when he was selling his company, want to spend the rest of my life giving the money away and making a difference. And Bob ended up being mentored by Drucker for about 25 years. And Drucker tells Bob, going into the 80s, like in the early 80s, and, and this is like astounding. There's less than 50 megachurches at the time. And Drucker says to Bob, in a hundred years, historians are going to say that the megachurch phenomena, he called it, the large church phenomena, is going to be one of the single biggest social phenomenas of the last hundred years. Drucker says this Bob Buford in the early 80s, when there's less than 50 megachurches. And so Bob is now ready to transition from a marketplace to a kingdom philanthropist. What am I going to do in the kingdom? And Bob says to Drucker, if that's the case, what should I do? And Drucker says to Bob, you're going to have all these emerging pastors who are, I'll use the word shepherd now. Shepherd pastors who've not been trained how to manage large, growing things. You should start an organization that brings management and leadership to these pastors that are going to grow large churches. So Bob said, how should I do that? And Drucker said, go find 20 young guys that are young right now that don't have their mega churches yet, but you can ride the wave with them and pour gas on what they're doing. So on Bob's desk sat a picture. I was a personal strategic advisor with him for about 15 years, and he had a picture on his desk of the early 1980s gathering in Estes park that he and Peter Drucker convened that original group of about 20 leaders. In the picture of these young 20 somethings are Bill Hybels, Randy Pope, the list goes on and on, that if you really looked at the boomer pastors that you would consider, like the hall of fame of the boomer, you know, the boomer builder pastors that built our megachurch side, they're in that picture. And so out of that, that was such a big hit at that first gathering that they decided that let's start an organization that continually convenes these pastors of what are going to be large churches and help equip them with management and the different tools that they're going to need. That took off partly because think what's going on now in the mid-80s. There's no Internet, there's no cell phone.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Yeah, yeah. People need to know that there's no Internet.

[Todd Wilson]

There's not these large path, these pastors like Hybels. There is no peer to peer. How do you get peer to peer learning? The way you do it right now,

[Carrie Newhoff]

you can't text your buddy, you can't swap learnings. I mean you're either books or conferences or cassettes. That's about it.

[Todd Wilson]

In fact, when Leadership Network started to give you perspective in 1984, the way they communicated, they had a list of 5,000 churches, fax machine numbers and every week they sent a fax to about 5,000 churches with equipping information to the churches. That's insane right now, Carrie. But there's no.

[Carrie Newhoff]

I successfully avoided ever faxing much in my life. It was an outgoing technology when I came up and I'm like going to learn this one, it's not going to be around. So I always think faxes are funny.

[Todd Wilson]

Leadership Network quickly in the mid-80s there became like the. There's nobody else doing what they're doing, which is convening pie. I'm going to now use the word pioneering or early, you know, innovative pastors that you. Bob's philosophy was let's the diffusion of innovation curve, let's find the 2 1/2 percent. They're going to set the pace for everybody else.

[Carrie Newhoff]

The innovators and the early adopters.

[Todd Wilson]

The innovators and early adopters.

[Carrie Newhoff]

And so if I can interrupt again, interject with my little points, one of the things I think might have been new and correct me if I'm wrong, is everything prior to that had been denominational.

[Todd Wilson]

Right.

[Carrie Newhoff]

And non denominational was starting. And the bottom line is if you were Presbyterian or you were a Lutheran or you were Episcopalian, you stuck to your tribe.

[Todd Wilson]

Right?

[Carrie Newhoff]

But what an organization like Leadership Network did was it just pulled people from all these other areas and cross pollinated and got them in the same room together. And we take that for granted now. But that was groundbreaking. Like people didn't do that.

[Todd Wilson]

Right.

[Carrie Newhoff]

And in fact, is that accurate?

[Todd Wilson]

Oh, it's totally accurate. I'll give you this we can put this in the show notes for the people that like to look at the history stuff. I, I was able, it was a blessing to interview every CEO of Leadership Network from its founding through its ending.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Yeah, it wound down what, five, 10

[Todd Wilson]

years ago, 20, 22. So.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Oh, just recently. Okay, I didn't know that. Yeah.

[Todd Wilson]

Became part of Exponential, actually right toward.

[Carrie Newhoff]

That's right. I knew that part.

[Todd Wilson]

And so Fred Smith Jr. Who was the original with Bob Jo, you know, got Leadership Network going and he was the first president or CEO. Fred told me that he gave me the whole detailed history of how they pulled those people together and why. And there was a report done, Carrie, back in the early 80s of larger church. They just call it larger churches. And it was a denominational study that showed there was virtually no cross pollination between the churches and that one of the biggest felt needs of the pastors was the peer to peer connection piece. I had multiple, I interviewed as many as I could of guys that were in those early groups, guys like Robert Lewis and Randy Pope and others. And they absolutely confirmed that the reason they wanted to be at the table was the peer to peer connection. Randy Pope specifically told me, you know, coming from his background, that pca, I think it is, that it just was so refreshing to get in a room with other, with other lead pastors that were wrestling with the same issues and give the cross denominational.

[Carrie Newhoff]

And what I've discovered, you know, because I come from a denominational background, is we tend as human beings and as leaders to resonate most with people who have a similar spirit. You mentioned entrepreneurial pastors. You know, I'm an entrepreneur. Just, you can call it apostleship, you can call it whatever, but. And you also resonate most with people who are a size, the same size, a little bit beneath you or a little bit above you. Right. So if you're a church of a thousand, you want to get around somebody with a church of 2,000. And it's not that you are upset about being in a room with someone with a church of 50, it's just you don't have a lot to talk about because your day is not the same, your leadership load is not the same. And I found, and I think this is one of the reasons I became non denominational. There were just fewer and fewer people to talk to in our denomination as our church grew. And I realized how I was wired and I was always jumping on planes and going to conferences and in the Internet, on the Internet, trying to find like minded leaders. And I found that tribe and people today, I mean, if you started in leadership in the last 15 years, you're like, well, of course.

[Todd Wilson]

Force.

[Carrie Newhoff]

No, that's like. That's new, man. That's new.

[Todd Wilson]

Right, right. So.

[Carrie Newhoff]

And Buford started as sort of his philanthropic. Philanthropic endeavor. He started a leadership network in 1984.

[Todd Wilson]

In 1984. And then a few years later, he wrote the book Halftime Moving from Success to Significance. So he had sort of one foot in the pour gas on the Met, what would become the megachurch phenomena. But his real heartbeat was seeing individual leaders. Like he was mobilized in their calling. Like. Yeah. So his personal mission statement was activating the latent capacity of Christianity into active energy. Right. And so he also had the leadership network. Peace. We are a halftime piece. So we're mid to late 80s is really where we would say we're starting to put some gas on what would become this megachurch phenomena. There's, you know, we're.

[Carrie Newhoff]

This is pre multi site. This is just churches getting bigger.

[Todd Wilson]

Yeah, we're way pre multi site right now. This is focused on helping churches get bigger at this point. And I mean, who doesn't want to get bigger? And it's a. The word phenomena is the right. It's the large church phenomenon. How do we support doing this? Now? There's an accelerator that now comes along while. Well, let me highlight two things. The entire church growth industry as we know it today. Make a list of 50 organizations helping with church growth. That is an. If you think of it as an industry in a positive way, it's an industry that did not exist in 1985.

[Carrie Newhoff]

True.

[Todd Wilson]

It literally didn't exist. What did start happening was individual consultants. Guys like Lyle Schaller, Carl Jordan, Bill Easom. Bill Easom is a huge voice in this. Interviewed him for this book too. So you're getting these sort of legendary consultants that are speaking into things, but then sprinkled around them, an entire industry is born. Capital campaigns, generosity campaigns, Building architectural firms, church marketing companies, church design companies. It's just if you drew a curve of the exponential growth of support ministries, it didn't exist before 1985. We're seeing that factor happening now. We're seeing consultants ramping up. But here's the real jetpack, in my opinion, this young kid, Rick Warren, who's now grown his church bigger. He hasn't yet written the Purpose Driven Church, but he starts doing seminars on his principles. That your Purpose driven church. And this is what's fascinating. 1990. Now the church. I'm a part of that. I'm still on staff at that, you know, found it exponential out of. I asked our lead pastor, our church started in 1994. Tell me the three most significant things that you looked at or did to start the church in 1993. So. No, that's easy. Rick Warren, he did 13 cities where he did this tour talking about purpose driven churches. I took furious notes. And it was this Rick Warren purpose driven thing before there was ever a book. And guess what number two was those fuller conferences. And here's what's fun for me in the story is Bob Buford. If we're back to Leadership Network now, Bob saw one of the Rick Warren's training things, said every church needs this. And Bob funded the whole year city tour events, 13 city tour events to take that across the country. One of which was the one of my home church that became. Yes, it became a church of attending the thing. And so here's what happened, Carrie. It's fascinating because you and I grew up in it. We just take for granted the purpose driven model and the baseball diamond and the concentric circles.

[Carrie Newhoff]

It came out the year I started at the three little churches that would go on to become connections. And I remember getting an early copy and going, oh my goodness, this is a revolutionary.

[Todd Wilson]

Yeah. And here's. Here's what. Where things start to converge a little bit that most people don't understand the history on. So I like to call the purpose driven and you can say model. It's really a set of principles. Yeah. I call it the jet pack on the church growth phenomena. Like it's the jetpack. And here's why. Rick is a master at taking something complicated and simplifying it into something really easy to understand. Okay. So follow my logic in this. Peter Drucker. I'm going to go back to Peter Drucker. Peter Drucker was mentoring Bill Hybels and, and Rick Warren. Okay. We're back in the 80s. There's a mentoring relationship. Drucker's most famous work in management is what's called the five most important questions you'll ever ask your organization. Who's the customer? What do they value? How do you deliver it? How do you know what difference you're making? But it's who's the customer? So if you go read the purpose driven church through the lens of who's the customer? That is Drucker's impact. Okay.

[Carrie Newhoff]

And that was the whole seeker sensitive movement origin.

[Todd Wilson]

It's what ties it all together. It influenced Hybels with the seeker movement. Who's the customer, what do they value? How you deliver influenced Warren, who's the customer? How do you deliver it? And so now read the Purpose Driven Church through that lens. Saddleback Sam and Samantha. After Rick goes and does all of his surveys in the community and figures out what the community needs, he boils it down to two avatars, Saddleback Sam and Sally. I don't remember the exact. 32 years old, married, 2.5 kids.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Here's their income. This is where they live.

[Todd Wilson]

Here's where they live. Now how are we going to reach them and meet their felt needs? There better be a parking attendant in the parking lot so they're not confused when they get there and the experience they have when they come in. There ought to be friendly greeters with food, with whatever. We better have high quality Sunday services. You can start to see this is the cross current, Carrie. It's like, man, this is such a safe, good way to reach more people and yet we're playing to felt needs, not real needs right now.

[Carrie Newhoff]

There you go. Felt needs, not real needs. What do you mean, Todd?

[Todd Wilson]

We know the real needs of these lost people is knowing Jesus, surrendering fully to Jesus and being on a path of a surrendered life. And so Rick was a genius at this. He, he has a baseball diamond, is in the purpose driven Church. And the idea is how do we move people spiritual growth from to first base and let's just call first base conversion. Let's get them saved and we move them around the bases through increasing maturity of serving and eventually fourth basis mobilizing, like mobilizing beyond the church kind of thing. Well, here's what ends up happening, Carrie. And I mean I've looked at this hard is winning was originally, let's keep people around the bases and get them developed and fully surrendered and going. And here's what we've done in the US Church, winning is getting the most possible people to first base.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Exactly. Just fill the room, fill the room,

[Todd Wilson]

fill the room, get as. Let's get them saved. Regardless of the quality of the process, regardless of the surrender, say a prayer and get them saved. And there's not necessarily a life change. Which when your question is what's the real need versus the felt need? What ends up happening when winning becomes filling the room? We got to go after their felt need. What do they need? Oh, they're having a marriage problem. Oh, they're having a this, they're having that. We end up with a, I'm going to call it a programmatic Sunday centric thing. That's how you serve the masses.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Yeah, it's a good point. Now, Rick was on a few months ago and he said the one thing, he said, 1% of churches get this because you start a movement and you can't be responsible for what people do with it. Or I write a book, you write a book. You can't be responsible. You can be responsible for what you put in it. You can't be responsible for what people take out of it. You can do your best. But he said, I think I'm paraphrasing him accurately here. Rick said, on this podcast, he says, everybody says come and see. That's the attractional model. Come and see. Come and see. He says, but here's what only 1% of pastors and churches get. You got to take people from come and see to come and die. He said, that's what Jesus did. So I think that was in the model like. And that's like Willow was for, you know, all the challenges that we had with Willow. It was like to make people fully devoted followers of Jesus, but. But people seized on the filling the room and then we ended up with, you know, light versions of all that and distorted versions of all that. And then there was a fly in the ointment and you end up with a consumer mentality. You're right. You're kind of co opting the culture to reach the culture and you end up with a compromise.

[Todd Wilson]

That's why, Carrie, I mean, let's not be afraid of the word co opted for a minute because our first co opting as a was of McGavran's ideals.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Sure. Which are basically for the mission field.

[Todd Wilson]

Was for the mission field and was for gospel saturation through disciple making. His paradigm wasn't even a US setting. But those ideals do get, for some positive reasons, co opted. Now we get to Warren's model and the power of the Purpose Driven model. Easy language, easily embraceable. You don't have to have a degree in anything to implement his model. You could, a ninth grader can understand the model.

[Carrie Newhoff]

He is genius at that. Complicated ideas, simply expressed.

[Todd Wilson]

And it's so simple and so powerful that 15 years ago, Carrie, if I was teaching a room of 50 church planners something I'd always open up with. How many of you have read the Purpose driven church? And 15 to 20 years ago, every hand in the room goes up.

[Carrie Newhoff]

I'm going pretty much every kid.

[Todd Wilson]

Yeah. Suggest to you that 50% of megachurches in America right now were founded by someone using, intentionally using the purpose driven model.

[Carrie Newhoff]

And this is the Challenge for millennial and Gen Z leaders taking over. They don't understand. They're like, why is it this way? They haven't connected the dots right back to my seminary illustration. It's like, no, actually this is probably somewhere in the DNA of your church and you don't know why you like it. And you don't know why you don't like it.

[Todd Wilson]

It, this is why it's, it absolutely is in there. The book I told you I started out to write that now is the second book. I identified what I call 12 dilemmas that we face. A dilemma is something, it can be good. Is it this or is it this? Is it this or is it this? And we literally have a history right now in this modern church growth movement where well intentioned people were faced with decisions they can't always control what's going to come after them. And we have created a bunch of dilemmas that we now have to figure out how to undo. And one of those dilemmas, Carrie, is the dilemma of inheritance. It's the dilemma that if we're on the international mission field and we want to start a movement, guess what we start with? 3 to 6 months of prayer and fasting. Let's hear God and what it is we need to do. If you're starting a church in the US what do you do for the first three to six months? You start with an inherited model and you got a certain cash flow time period to get things going. There's no time to go undo anything. You're inheriting what's there. And what I started to say is 15 to 20 years ago, every hand in the room would go up if you read the Purpose Driven Church. Same thing today. Ask a room full of 50 planters how many of you have read the church, the Purpose Driven Church, One or two hands go up. And the answer is don't worry about reading it. You don't need to because it is now so embedded in the operating system of our, of how we do church in the US that you'll have to do a strategy to undo it. You don't need to learn how to do it. You've got to do a strategy to undo it. And that's where the paradox is going to come in for Gen Z and Gen Alpha is. I would say it this way. Generationally, Carrie, the boomers largely built what we've got. Rick's a boomer and good intentions, good things built it. The current gatekeepers of the church, for my research here, the current gatekeepers are now Gen X. It's Gen X. Yeah, yeah.

[Carrie Newhoff]

My generation is the new senior generation.

[Todd Wilson]

You are the gatekeepers. And it's passing to millennials. Guys like Andy Cook and you start looking at the numbers. Andy Wood at Saddleback now and Andy Wood at Saddleback. Josh Howard, you, you've got a growing number of millennials. And here's the thing. From Boomer to Gen X to Millennial, it's essentially passing the same operating system. We're passing on these things.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Right. We've changed. We painted the car a different color, we, you know, put some new wheels on, but it's still the same car.

[Todd Wilson]

And the challenge, we'll get to this eventually. But the challenge we're going to have, Kerry, is we really are. I mean, I'm going to say this, I feel strongly about it. We're, we're, we're 60 years into an evolutionary process right now. It's not actually radically revolutionary what's happened. It's this timeline, when you put it all together. Yeah. Multi sites innovative. But all it is is another service in a different location. Okay. Yeah. Externally focused. That's an innovation. But gee, sure seems like the church has been externally focused for 2,000 years. Oh, missional, yeah, that's an innovation. But gee, the church is called to be missional from day one. So in some ways, even the things we would say are most innovative in the church, we have been evolutionary around a common operating system that is rooted in this purpose driven approach. It's rooted in.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Yeah. So you think just to date it, because I think this is important. This is sort of where we all came from and what we've all inherited, that maybe the innovation window was 75 to 95. Somewhere in there is where things really got. It was a fresh thinking.

[Todd Wilson]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Okay.

[Todd Wilson]

Well, the way I would clarify what you just said is I think by 95, by 95, we've really seen the things mature. The purpose driven model is now what's fueling most of the churches that are getting going. It's fueling the megachurch phenomena. And what I would say is by 95, there's some fascinating things that start happening in the early 90s that we ought to talk about. But really what's happening is the institutionalization part is starting to come into play, like where it's more the institution, but at the same time there's this entrepreneurial piece happening. So I kind of name it the intrapreneurial area. It's like it's internally focused on institutionalization. But now you get this entire look at what's happening. The birth of modern church planting networks, multisite, the missional conversation, the externally focused conversation. All of those things are within a 10 year time period. And they're all rooted in an entrepreneurial, outwardly focused thought. But in most of their cases, if we're really honest, there's still church growth strategies for a mothership. Sure.

[Carrie Newhoff]

One of the other shifts you talk about, that started to happen in the early 90s and this is what I kind of inherited. Global Leadership Summit. It went from fuller, it went from itinerant speakers to. And this was new churches started hosting conferences. So long before VOO conference or anything else like that, there was a global leader. Well, what was it? It was originally prevailing church or something. I'm trying to remember what they called it back in the day. And then it became Leadership Summit.

[Todd Wilson]

Centuries, what Leadership Network did. So we can talk about that for a few minutes?

[Carrie Newhoff]

Yeah, let's do it.

[Todd Wilson]

Yeah. So this was another eye opener for me, Carrie. I mean I, I was in the marketplace in the 90s and at a. At a very good organization, one of the top in the world, engineering wise. And here's what's fascinating to me. In 1995, we never use the word leadership. I'm telling you, we, we nep. It wasn't a word. In fact, if you go back and look at what had been going on from the 60s through 95, management's the thing people talk about. Quality management, Six Sigma, really. Management's what everybody's talking about. So when I came into ministry in the late 90s, I had no paradigm for leadership. For me, management was the deal. Here's what's fascinating. In the work I did on this book, I went back to look at the history of leadership in the church. Like just the history of it. And one simple metric was to look at leadership publications from 1900 to 2025. I've got a graph of that of leadership publications from 19. From 1900 to 1985. So 85 years now go 85. There's almost no leadership publications happening. Almost none. It's very well in fact, in the church space, leadership is all about character, being men and women of God. It's not the enterprise side of leadership, it's the personal side, which is where we have a lot of our struggles

[Carrie Newhoff]

in church today, which we should be focused on that.

[Todd Wilson]

And what I'm saying is from 1900 to 1985, leadership focus was on personal integrity issues. Being men and women of God, you just don't get much of anything on what I Call the enterprise part, part of things. Okay, so look what happens now. From 85 to 95, there are as many leadership publications done in 10 years as the collective of all the leadership resources from 1900 to 1985. From 95 to 2005, it quadruples. It's an exponential curve.

[Carrie Newhoff]

I remember. And it's still going up, right? If I remember that chart from your book, like it's off the charts now.

[Todd Wilson]

What I ended up realizing is what I would say is the birth of the modern church, of the modern leadership sector. Don't even put the word church in front of it. The birth of the modern leadership sector is a 1990s thing. And if you now jump into the church, John Maxwell, his couple of books is the catalyst. You've got Ken Blanchard, John Maxwell, and you got a several secular authors. You can see the lights going off on the leadership part of it in 90 to 95. And here's what happens, Gary, look at the convergence of things here. You've got on one hand, I'm going to call it the moving from church as a mission to church as an enterprise. It's a really important thing to get your hands around up until 1985, 99 point something. I don't know the exact decimal point, but it's 99 point something. Of every church in the history of the United States has been a mission based organization. Probably under 100 people. Think of, think what I'm thinking. A mission based organization. It's. There's a cause, there's one staff person, there's an elder board. It's linear and we can fight over all the goods and bads about that, but it's a mission. One of the most fascinating things I read in this whole writing of this book is in Lyle Schaller. Bob Buford was wrestling with the growth of leadership network. And Lyle wrote him a letter and said, Bob, here's the deal. An organization with four staff is a mission cause based thing. An organization with 20 staff is an enterprise. When you get to five or more staff, there's no way around it. There's an enterprise dynamic that enters. And Carrie, you gotta let that sink in. That coincides with why the birth of the leadership, the church leadership sector. You've got this large church phenomena starting to happen. What Drucker says is true. Pastors aren't equipped to grow big things. They don't get the training to do it. Where are they going to turn for the training for running an enterprise? I would argue strongly that starting by 1995, Church is an enterprise. It's an enterprise sector. And now we need to equip the enterprise sector with a new leadership sector. So look at the timing here. If you can go check this. Look at the timing prior. If you go, look at when the first college degrees, undergrad and graduate degrees in leadership were available. Not until after the 1970s. There's no degrees in college in leadership until after the 70s. Now look at this. Andy Stanley starts North Point around 95, but early 90s. The only major leadership conference I could find in this research, Leadership Network was running a thing called the church of the 21st century and invite only 400 pastors to a leadership thing. And guess who was running it for Leadership Network. Bill Hybels in Willow Creek.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Interesting.

[Todd Wilson]

Bill was the coordinator in the emcee. Their band would do it. And as we're coming up on the mid-90s, Bob said to Bill, you just need to go run with this and do it. So Leadership Network stops doing their church of the 21st Century Conference and the Global Leadership Summit starts.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Well, and you know, just to put this in context, I mean, I started at very small churches. So when you say 99 point whatever percent of American churches in the history, history of America or Canada or fill in your country here we're small, under 100 people. Todd, you know this. There's not a lot to manage. I mean, you have a small budget, congregational dynamics, you know everybody by name. You have an annual meeting. It wasn't that hard. And then we started to grow and I'll tell you, it got complicated. And then we sold our buildings and then we became a portable church. And then we built a brand new facility and we added 1, 2, 3 services. And all of a sudden I am in over my head. And I remember at that time going to Global Leadership Summit as a satellite site. And occasionally we'd make the pilgrimage to Chicago. But you know, Bill having to explain what an executive pastor was because nobody knew. And it was basically a COO for the church because we'd all been traditionally trained by seminaries. And how much training did we get in running a million dollar budget? Zero. Running multiple staff? Zero. Dealing with strategic planning?

[Todd Wilson]

Zero.

[Carrie Newhoff]

I mean, there was no training because the model wasn't ready for what was happening on the ground. And here I am. And when people ask me, well, what do you do, Carrie? It's like, well, I went to law school and they never taught me how to run a law firm. And I went to seminary. They never taught me how to run a church. So basically I Try to help leaders fill in the blanks. And that's what I do. And you know, so for people to understand that. And that was like literally a couple decades ago. We were so hungry.

[Todd Wilson]

The thing is, Carrie, it's like I keep using the word cross current. It's a cross current. Like you want big churches or not?

[Carrie Newhoff]

Like man, what's your view on that? Do you want them or not?

[Todd Wilson]

Well, I want whatever. God, yes. I want big churches, little churches and everything in between. And the issue is, why would you not want to have a growing church if you could have it? Now? What I want more than a really big church is a reproducing church. But let's just say.

[Carrie Newhoff]

And more people coming into the kingdom.

[Todd Wilson]

Yes, people coming, whatever form that takes. But let's, let's play this out. If we're successful and we're growing something, if we say we're good with big churches, there is no way around. It's a God designed world. You're going to have enterprise dynamics. You're going to have enterprise dynamics with big organizations. And here's the consequence now you're going to have a church CEO. I don't care if anybody likes me saying that or not. As soon as church is an enterprise, enterprises have things called CEOs. So who's the CEO? And as soon as you've got a co, the lead pastor, they're desperately going to want a coo, the executive pastor. You can look what was happening in the mid-90s here, Carrie. I came into full time ministry at the end of the 90s as an executive pastor. You couldn't find a job description for an executive pastor. Like it's part of why I didn't want to go into ministry. I don't, I don't want to be a lead pastor. I don't even know what an executive pastor is. Now I can look back at it. Church was becoming an enterprise. There's a CEO. Look what's happening in governance. If you want to start understanding a bunch of the moral failures and other things going on, as soon as you've got an enterprise, all of a sudden those four elders that get together three times a week to pray and oversee the one pastor and the church. Now when it becomes an enterprise, we got to go to policy governance. Now all of a sudden that church CEO and coo, they need an executive team and they've got policy governance to be doing things beyond what the elders are really overseeing. So our authority structures are changing. Go find that. And I realize it's a Cultural thing biblically, but at the time the Bible was written, church and what Paul's writing to isn't an enterprise. An enterprise in the sense of there's a CEO and we got to have governance structures that are decentralized and now bring the innovations in things like multi site that further decentralize things and complicate. And complicate. So what we have to recognize is the shadow effect that happens from the definition success being bigger and bigger, bigger and bigger brings consequences with it. And we can't on one hand say, oh, we can't have all these things, the bad things happening and at the same time say, but our definition of success that we want to aspire to is to be the top church on the top 100 biggest churches in America like it because there's an enterprise piece there.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Yeah, you know, you brought me back to something I have not thought about in years. And I saw a mental image of myself in the 90s on my, I don't know, 486 penny images computer with dial up Internet writing out. Speaking of moving from a little pastoral setting to an enterprise, we started to grow fairly quickly and you know, it was a dozen people in a few dozen and suddenly we're into the low hundreds. And I still remember because I had no idea how to do this. Just going into a Word doc and setting up columns so that I had a record of who would come. Todd Wilson, address, phone number. I mean that was me, me entering it into a Word document and doing our discipleship resources and doing our Bible studies and doing all that. And there's a certain point and obviously I didn't handle the finances, never ever did that. We always had independent, you know, treasurers and then eventually a team, et cetera, et cetera, and auditors. But there's a system at which you just can't handle it. Like the complexity. I always said, you know, if Connexus broke, I wouldn't know how to fix it. Same with this company. Now it's gotten. This was a hobby and now it's so complex. I have a small but mighty team. Like I basically do this. I don't know how it all works. I don't know. And I think a lot of church leaders find themselves in a situation like that where you've got to have people to manage it or else, as Carl George and Warren Bird said, it just shrinks back to 100 people. And then you can manage it on your little word template and away you go. And hopefully you can issue a, all the tax receipts Properly.

[Todd Wilson]

But I think it's a conversation for another day for you and maybe somebody who's an expert in it. But you just use the word management about six times in that last couple of sentences, and it's. And we're back to where's leadership? Like, the complexity you're talking about.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Well, my leadership was getting out of management. I'm not a good manager. I can. I can. I can find leaders, Todd, but I'm not a good manager.

[Todd Wilson]

Yeah, but that. That enterprise that's formed in this integration between the management role and the leadership role, that's what gets really ornery, I think, in the middle.

[Carrie Newhoff]

And I think, you know, the moral failure. And we said we weren't going to talk about it, but, I mean, there are serious problems. And there are small church pastors who have affairs. There are small church pastors who are corrupt. And it just doesn't make the headlines, you know, for the most part. And. But I think the system. I want to write a book on this. Like, where is the moral line? All of us struggle in leadership. All of us struggle in leadership with one thing for another. But I think one of the reasons. I mean, some people are probably diabolical, and they're just out to ruin the church and ruin people's lives. I don't think most people, as you said, start out that way, but I think sometimes the system becomes so big, and everybody I talk to who leads a megachurch, unless they inherited it, if they started it, it's like, did you ever think it would be this big? And the answer is no. I had no idea. They're gasping for air. They're trying to figure it out. We got church planters who planted last year who are like, my goodness, we're at 400 people. I thought we'd be at 40. What do we do? What if you're at 1400 in a year? And I think that that system. And I think God uses it it like he uses it. I'm not all for everybody just gather in your house and, you know, I think we're in another era now, and I want to get behind pastors, but I think sometimes it just gets so overwhelming that they kind of lose touch with their soul. They lose touch with God, maybe they lose touch with their character. The character doesn't grow at the pace of their platform, and, you know, you end up in the ditch. I don't know. Do you have any thoughts on that?

[Todd Wilson]

Yeah, I. I mean, I want to be real clear, too. I'm definitely in the work on this book and everything I've done on it for two years. Carrie, I'm not trying to attribute what we're talking about to why moral failures are happening. Oh, sure, yeah. I. What I do think is a fair thing to look at is the bigger and more complex something gets and the more decentralized it gets so that the. Now I'm going to say the CEO has more and more responsibility, that's decentralized, so more and more of what they do is out of sight, out of mind. And that more complex thing, for me, the issue comes back to. I'm going to use the word authority and accountability. How are we putting authority and accountability structures in place in a context that we know is radically more complex and. And decentralized than what things used to be? And that. I don't think that's a thing we have to say. Oh, because of that, we shouldn't do large things or whatever. I think at the same time, though, we should say it is a reality that there's a difference between one lead pastor in a church of 100 who meets with the elders multiple times and is in small groups with them and doing it. And virtually everything that pastor's doing from a work standpoint is visible to one a church co of 15 campuses and multiple things. And you know how complex that is. And things are out of sight, out of mind.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Yeah. And I think part of it, too, and this is one of the things I'm committed to, both in my life and also in what we do on this podcast and in all the things I do, is how do you make sure you grow your character as hard as you work on your character, as hard as you work on your competency, maybe twice as hard as you work on your competency. Because, you know, a lot of us leading, and we got corporate leaders, too, you just find yourselves in positions you never thought you'd find yourself in in terms of responsibility. And if you don't guard that character well, like, I could have been roadkill 172 times along the way, Todd. Like, it would not have taken a lot. And by the grace of God, I'm still here. And we're going away and been married for 35 years and. And very thankful for that. But I get it, and I think you're right. I don't think the answer is, well, no church can grow beyond 50 people. Or what would you say? Because I'm just imagining the comments right now. Comments are so fun in the era of social media, but for people who would say, and this is why pastors can't be CEOs, they have to be shepherds. What's your thought on that?

[Todd Wilson]

I, I'm not sure, Carrie. Like I. Is it good to have shepherds? Yes. Is it good to have apostolic evangelists? Yes.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Like, yes, if you take CEO out and it's an apostolic evangelist, that's what's

[Todd Wilson]

loaded in the question is exactly in it. If we don't use the word co for a second. And now let me just talk about Ephesians 4. You know, God calls some to be apostles and some evangelists and some shepherds and some teachers and I mean, do we need people like the apostle Paul who was an evangelist apostle? I mean, somebody who's taking new ground? I'm not sure we'd be talking right now if the apostle Paul isn't taking new ground.

[Carrie Newhoff]

So if it was up to Peter, it might be a very small movement that had petered out. But I think God knocked Paul off his horse for a reason.

[Todd Wilson]

Right. So I, I, for me, it's a little bit easier to think about instead of saying should we or shouldn't we? It's if we are going to have God blessing big and complex things, what do we need to do to adjust, to provide that accountability and the, and the things over it? Because at the end of the day we're losing ground on lostness and it's like we better figure out how to, you know, it isn't like we need to cancel one thing so we can do more something else. But I do think we've got to, you know, figure out how to manage

[Carrie Newhoff]

what you're talking well, and then otherwise what do we do? We're just terrible stewards of the people that God brought us. If he keeps bringing more and we let our organization fall apart and we don't grow in leadership or management and we just kind of whatever. Like, I don't think that's the answer either. Anyway, good digression. Okay, churches start doing leadership conferences. But then let's talk about the height of the seeker sensitive movement. I think we covered it. There might be a few more things. And then that kind of morphs into attractional church, doesn't it? And at the same time there's emerging and missional. It's all stirring in a pot around the turn of the millennium.

[Todd Wilson]

That's why the 95 to 2005 window is, I would say by 95, the attractional piece of it is well solidified with the purpose driven piece with.

[Carrie Newhoff]

See, we weren't calling it attractional then. It was Called Seeker Sensitive. But it was basically the genesis was there.

[Todd Wilson]

And in some ways where that came from was when the missional conversation started to come in strong. It's a pitting of the two. It's missional or attractional. It's as if you got to be one or the other. You can be missional or you can be attractional as opposed to. And in fact, in the early days of exponential, back in the, in the early 2000s, we actually commissioned Hugh Halter and Matt Smay to do a book on missional and attractional that we need to be.

[Carrie Newhoff]

And it's not because it's always been a rivalry, but you were trying to get them. I had, I just got to put this in there as a, as a bookmark to myself. I had a fascinating conversation with Mark Sayers over lunch because missional kind of started in Australia. Totally off the record. He's willing to come on the record sometime, but he's got a very interesting take on why missional church never really took off. So Mark, if you're listening, we gotta have that conversation. But anyway, yeah, so there's missional emerging attractional and then seeker sensitive sort of becoming attractional and what's going on in that cauldron of that decade.

[Todd Wilson]

Yeah, so I'll start with this just with the endpoint on it. I had come into ministry when the missional conversations were starting to rise, which

[Carrie Newhoff]

is what, around 2000.

[Todd Wilson]

And I'm going to put us into that here in a second. But I was at almost mega church at the time where we're focused on all of the things we're talking about. We were planted, purpose driven, we're seeker sensitive. We were just doing our first multi site in 2000, which we'll get to that part of it. I mean, we're doing all the fill in the blank, seeker sensitive, attractional, whatever. And now these missional conversations are rising. And I would tell you at the time, if you're riding down the road on your bike and this little yappy schnauzer comes chasing after you, biting at your ankles, that's literally how I described it in 2000. It's like, I just want to get off the bike and drop kick these guys. Like it's. I mean, that's how I was feeling in 2000. Like, come on guys, we got work to do, there's lost people, let's get on with it.

[Carrie Newhoff]

And I might have felt the same way. Just so you know, here's the thing.

[Todd Wilson]

In my, in my reflections writing this book, I went Back and reviewed over 20 missional books written back in that time period. If many of those were being written today, they'd be bestsellers. In fact, I'd like.

[Carrie Newhoff]

20 years ahead, they were.

[Todd Wilson]

I'd like to go do a retro thing right now. In fact, if I were a book publisher, I'd try to do a retro where I'd go take 10 or 15 of the books from the 95 to 2005 window. Neil Cole has some really good stuff written back then that just needs to get gas poured on it again. So here's what I would tell you in the middle of this, Carrie. 95 to 2005, which is a lot to talk about. I. If, if there was a dirty little secret book I could publish stuff like from this book of all my research stuff, the most unpublished parts of my book that I can't publish come from this time period.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Okay.

[Todd Wilson]

And it's partly, I'm gonna say it's the combination of the missional attractional, which we'll get into here, but it's also where the progressive versus traditional theological conversations are starting to.

[Carrie Newhoff]

So the whole progressive versus the conservatives

[Todd Wilson]

that started to hit in that time

[Carrie Newhoff]

period because emerging church became progressive pretty quickly.

[Todd Wilson]

And that's what's coming out of this 95 to 2005. So if we look coming into 95, Carrie, and we'll get back to history right now. So Leadership Network is serving large churches, which that's taking off. I mean, they're. The curve is up and to the right. And according to Brad Smith, their CEO at the time, did an interview with them, the number one thing that they were getting feedback from the large churches was a concern over how are we going to get Gen X leadership in place. Like, how are we going to mobilize Gen X leaders like you? How are we going to get the Gen X we were the kids once into place. And so they decided to convene what they called the Young Leaders Network. And just like what Leadership Network does, they formed a cohort. There was 15 to 20 leaders, probably 10 to 12 really core leaders in this Young Leaders Network. So here's the group, Carrie. You want to be a fly on the wall, then? Okay, so in this 95 to 2000 to roughly 2000 group of young leaders is Mark Driscoll, before he plants his church is Chris C. As he's planting his church is Dan Kimball, before he plants his church is Andrew Jones, an international missionary who's really doing some cool stuff. Tony Jones, Doug Padgett, Brian McLaren. I mean, when you look.

[Carrie Newhoff]

That's a. That's an interesting group.

[Todd Wilson]

In a group with Brian McLaren and Mark Driscoll. And so I interviewed as many of those folks as I could interview that. It's fascinating what was going on. Leadership Network convened them in 95. All. Most. All of them except McLaren were Gen X. And every one of them I interviewed confirmed that the reason they were coming together is they wanted to be missional. They wanted to figure out. And Leslie Newbegin was who they were looking at primarily.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Man, I did not know that until

[Todd Wilson]

I read your book, Leslie Newbegin and looking at what he was doing and what would it look like to plant missional churches in a postmodern era. So 95 to 2000, there's. It's really fascinating. A series of Gen X gatherings. There's a famous one in Santa Fe and another one, it's the one with the cursing Mercury Driscoll stories that you hear. And. And out of that you end up with. There's such a diversity of people that the guys like Kimball and Driscoll and Chrissy, they go off and play at churches and they're very focused on their planet. Churches. They're. Now the kids are coming along. They're busy with the kids. So the Young Leaders Network starts to disengage. You know, they're starting to associate. And out of that, the progressive side, Doug Padgett, Brian McLaren, Tony Jones, they formed what would be Emergent village or the Emergent conversation. Now, what's fascinating when you go look at it, the words emerging church, emergent, emerging village. It. Depending on what side of the spectrum you're on, the words are loaded words. So there's an entire. You know, I mean, I literally heard stories of people needing to change names of things they were doing because they were worried about how the impact in society was with the names, but that the progressive side of that really came out planting the seeds. I think you'd see the threads of the progressive side showing up in a lot of what's happened in the subsequent time periods from deconstruction of faith. The other things that are going on.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Yeah, because the emergent movement kind of could you. And progressivism that can be tied to deconversion, deconstruction, all of that. Is that a fair lineage or not really fair lineage?

[Todd Wilson]

And the reason I like to use the cross current and all these is it's. I didn't find much in that 95 to 2015 window that's just black and white cause and effects, which is what there's so much interplay between the different things that are going on that it's hard to single them out.

[Carrie Newhoff]

It was confusing at the time. I mean I was coming up, I was really starting to think about leadership. I was looking to other sources for information and I'll test this theory on you. I don't think I've ever said this on this podcast, almost 800 episodes in, but my take on the emergent church is it never really emerged because it led to deconstruction and it never became a thing. It was a big flash in the pan and then kind of dispersed and missional church. Missional church went from a noun we're missional to an adjective we're a missional church that's also attractional. And so I don't know whether that's fair or not.

[Todd Wilson]

Well, you definitely carry have. What was fascinating to me in putting this together is 95 to 2005, I tried to name the different eras. There's the secret era, the mega era, the multi era. 95 to 2005 was by far from 1955 to 2025, the hardest 10 year time period for me to name.

[Carrie Newhoff]

There was a lot going on, man stuff going on.

[Todd Wilson]

The birth of leadership, the missional attractional conversation, the hand we don't realize, but it really is the seeds of the handoff from Boomer to Gen X. I mean it's the where you're starting to mobilize Gen X into the next piece. So you've just got and and there Chris C. Said it really well. He told me, todd, we wanted to honor our peers. We wanted to stand on their shoulders and honor them and we didn't want to seem like mavericks wanting to do something different. But we knew with postmodern culture being different, we weren't going to just be able to do a saddleback Sam and Sally thing. It was going to happen.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Yeah, it was changing. It was a bit dated even a few years after its release in terms of that model and it was getting criticism already. The other thing that started at this time, which is interesting, I got dial up Internet and an email address I think in 96, a year after I started, like within months I guess of starting ministry. But I remember and you know, if you're of a certain vintage, you'll remember you couldn't always get on the Internet. You didn't always get a good connection. But when I did, churches started websites and I was telling Craig Groeschel the other day, I mean I remember following him back when he was blogging. I Remember Tim Stevens, Tony Morgan, Northpoint? In the early days, I told Andy once, I'm like, I think Heroes was one of the first series I ever saw of yours. And he was like, man, that was a long time ago. But it was dial up and it was really hard to watch, and it was all prototypical. But when you talk about the convergence in the 80s of these different influencers under Leadership Network, a lot of us were starting to self organize our own tribes that we followed even before Facebook and Twitter and Instagram came along. TikTok, we were starting to compile. I mean, there was a blog roll back in the day in the early 2000s that I jumped on. I think I started in 07 or something. But, you know, it was. It was a very interesting era because we had that cross pollinization. And I think that probably contributed to the confusion about, well, what is missional and what is attractional? Well, I knew what attractional was, but what, you know, what is all this stuff? So that's also a factor. Any other thoughts on how the Internet started to shape how we thought about ministry?

[Todd Wilson]

I think those things that were going on in 95 to 2005 that we're talking about, and you just said the iPhone, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, broadband Internet, you start looking at all of those things that didn't exist in 2000. Much. And by 2005-7 is when they're all there.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Exactly. And suddenly it's like, well, look at their band and look at that stage set. And we could do that. Hey, I want. And my thesis is that's what really fueled attractional church. It's like we're all watching each other for the first time. We're listening to each other. We're seeing beyond just a message clip. And we're seeing. That's how you guys do music. Those are the songs you're singing. And then the whole conference scene started. Catalyst, which you write about, emerged out of North Pointe and then went to the Gwinnett center, et cetera, et cetera. But that's where we all started taking copious notes. And you could do it in real time. It wasn't the annual conference. It was like every day you could go and learn. And I was like, furiously scribbling notes and trying to learn from some of the people I admired online.

[Todd Wilson]

Yeah. And I think all of those things, Carrie, like, we're jumping ahead here, but 2015 to 2025, so much of what was happening back in 95 to 2005, seed planting, that would influence what I call in two, in 2015 to 2025, the disruption era. If you take 2015 to 2025, I identified like 15 significant disruptions. Just a few, just platformed individualism. Because of the Internet, where we move. Platform individualism being, oh, the celebrity center of things. I. In the book, I talk about it, you know, moving from the radio station, the Sunday church, to the playlist dj. Now all of a sudden, because of the technology, I could just tune into who. Whatever voice I want to hear. Andy Stanley for this and Craig Groeschel for that. And I can do playlist, you know. But then this platform individualism, where I can be the center of things and build my own platform with nothing else, that would be one example of something. Deconstruction of faith, theological erosion, the progressive conversation. Let's. Let's take the most significant one. That's halfway in between. Covid, the accelerator of disruption. Like, you just get so many of these disruptions. The way I like to articulate it is disruption on top of disruption. They're like fractures. I think it actually explains the fracturing of evangelicalism. Like, you've got all these things coming together and converging in a time period where you get the chaos of all the disruptions creating fracture in a way that I'm not sure how we recover.

[Carrie Newhoff]

I mean, really, that would be your assessment of it now in 2026? I don't know how we recover.

[Todd Wilson]

I'm not wanting to be. I'm not wanting to sound too negative, Carrie. I just. Yeah, no, but I. Let's just take evangelicalism for a second. Like, if you asked me to articulate, like, the defining. Like, how do you boil it down? Okay, 25 years ago, if I'm going back into that 2000 time window, but let's even go to 1990, there is unity on sanctity of life, sanctity of marriage, sanctity of gender, and sanctity of scripture. We'll just call it the unity of sanctities. You think as people who used to call themselves evangelicals, where now would say they're not. How are we going to get back to unity on whatever defining things like that you want to bring together? I think we have so fractured the. Any sense of what used to bring us together in the division we're in that I. I want to believe, Carrie. And I'm just telling you what I want to believe right now. I'm not being prophetic here. Okay? I want to be optimistic that throughout history the forest has to burn for there to be the new life with the new thing, we have 70 years of evolutionary change and we have an operating system that if people will really look at it hard, it's a dying, outdated operating system. Okay. And that's not capable of producing what we want to see. So I actually find optimism in this, what I'm calling disruption era of 2020, 2015 to 2025. I don't know whether what's going on with Gen Z is a renewal or revitalization. I'm not sure what it is. Let's at the momentum say it's a resurgence, but new things happen with new generations. We are desperately in need of revolutionary change in the operating system of what we're doing. Evolutionary is going to come in direct collision with Gen Z and Gen Alpha right now. And I want to be optimistic that we're going to see some revolutionary things happening now. The challenge is we still have the inheritors controlling the influence part. The issue is going to be what's it look like to empower, equip and give permission to the next generation for new wine and new wineskin things.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Interesting. Okay, so you're seeing the revival. I know you mentioned it earlier, we're in overall decline still, like Barna, Pew research is very clear on that. But we are seeing some flames here and there that are very encouraging. Baptisms, young adults coming back to church. But you're right, you're putting your finger on something really interesting that might be a good place to close this seminary class out on. Todd. I have numerous friends that I text on a regular basis who are somewhere between late 20s and 40 who have inherited big churches from boomers, some Gen X, et cetera, et cetera. And they've got the machine that we just described, right? They've got multiple locations or thousands of people, et cetera, et cetera, other friends who are young who started a church, and Instead of having 200, they have 2000 now a couple years later. And when you're thinking about that and you're thinking about the forest burns to the ground and new life comes up, what does that new life look like? And maybe that's an unanswerable question, but like, I'm hoping everybody who inherited a large church is going to listen to this episode because they're going to realize, oh my gosh, this is how we got here. Right? Hence the title of your book. But what, what are your thoughts for those leaders who are maybe planting or inheriting in real time?

[Todd Wilson]

Yeah, I, I, the first thing that I would affirm is I, I, I don't Think the future should be about trying to burn something down. If I, I mean, I, I think the large churches that we have that are doing good things, I, I wouldn't go try to do revolutionary change to change things things. Our danger right now, Carrie, in my opinion, is coming out of COVID There was a consolidation that happened where big churches got bigger, partly because they're taking what's coming.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Small churches died, they just didn't make it.

[Todd Wilson]

Yeah, and, and I don't personally want to go work a lot on trying. If something seems to be working for somebody in what they're doing, I don't spend a lot of time trying to convince them that you're part of a dying system. Let's let it play out and accomplish its thing. Okay, but let's say what if the system is outdated and it's run its course? We need something new and it's going to be more revolutionary. So your question is. Well, what would the. I'm not, I'm really careful in this book. I don't want to try to be prophetic and have predictions sort of thing. But here's the approach I'm taking is if I go Back to Donald McGavern's principles, if I go back to what some of these legends. I mean, what was Hybels trying to do? What was Warren holistically trying to do in the four bases, what might revival look like? Like if we were getting back to some of the intentions without the co opting. Here's where mine come in. I, I think we've got to see a different scorecard. I think we've got to see expressions and ideals in the next generation that really get motivated by owning geographies across the seven domains of society and a

[Carrie Newhoff]

geography over what are the seven domains in society?

[Todd Wilson]

Those are the things. There's church, there's education, business, technology. Some people say nine hills, seven hills, it's whatever number you want to use across all the domains of society where the church kind of stays in its lane. And that's part of the problem. When the definition success is growing big, we're growing big in our domain. But are we really transforming society? We didn't go down this path. But the definition of a movement, if you really go look at definitions of a movement, there's typically a leader, there's a cause, there's followers, there's impact and there's generational, generational ripple to it. And if you take those five things, the real distinctives out of those are the impact and the generational. What's the impact. And that's where we got to look really hard at ourselves. Like, as we're growing these really big churches, what really across the domains of society in my geography, is divorce. Lower. Is pornography lower. We think about it inside the church, but we don't necessarily have a vision for gospel saturation that sees. McGavern did, like McGavern did that. So that's why I'm saying if we can get back to the gospel saturation vision, I like to say it this way. Go back to Schuller's thing. It's a way bigger vision to have a gospel saturation vision than growing a big church.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Yeah. And personal health. I mean, I think this has been really helpful, too. Like, that whole character platform thing, I think is huge. Like. Like, if you're stepping into something big. I've often thought, and I've said it before, but I'm really glad this podcast is something I didn't have in my 30s, because I don't think I could have handled the size or the, quote, success, whatever that means. I don't know that I had the character, and I don't know that I would have had an affair, but I could have just imploded and been a miserable person and died under the pressure. And I've learned a few things along the way. Right. But. But I think it's very, very helpful. And I think moral failure has been around as long as people have been around. And any student of history and spend 20 minutes in it, you're going to discover it in every size and everything. But I think there are unique pressures that come. And like I said, we've had hundreds of guests on this podcast, and most of them who have led very large organizations. Actually, I've never met one who said no. I knew exactly it was going to be 50,000. I knew exactly this was going to be a $20 billion corporation. Like, nobody, business leaders or church leaders, they all have dreams, but they don't think it's going to happen. But when it does happen, are you ready? Do you have the character with Stan? Do you have the team? Have you got the principles in place? Can you scale if your organization, if God blessed it? And beyond, just filling the building, if you change the community, if you change the city, if you did that, if you started multiplying, like, what are you actually multiplying? Are you multiplying health? Are you multiplying sickness? It's a good question to ask, man. And I don't know. I am going to come back to this episode More than once into your book, more than once. Are there any concluding thoughts? Because I am a realist about what's really going on. And like you, I haven't lost my optimism. Like, I think we're gonna figure it out.

[Todd Wilson]

Yeah, I. I think, Carrie, I mean, one of your disruptive trends this year is the discipleship, like, becoming more programmatic kind of thing. I think that's got to be part of it, is we're focused on the mission of the church of, you know, disciple making over the noun discipleship. I. I think what I'm really burdened by is the next generation part of this, that I don't think we can just assume that because there's some good brightness spots with it. We've got to figure out how do we come alongside, give permission, give cheerleading like it's. How do we allow new expressions, new things pouring gas on and at the same time not throw the baby out with the bathwater either. The part of what's gotten us where we are is a degradation on the theology. It's this platformed individualism. There's some challenges that we can't just assume the characters there. The solid theology's there. And I think what it looks like for boomers and Gen X and increasingly millennials to see their role as how am I equipping and mobilizing this next generation, not just for the evolutionary part, but what's it look like to truly give permission for some revolutionary change, Recognizing that we can't just assume that the character stuff you're talking about, I mean, the surveys right now are showing. It's funny, I was in a meeting with a guy the other day that highlighted that. He asked the question of us in the room. What'd you want to be when you were a kid? And everybody in the room, These are all boomers and Gen Xers in the room. And I wanted to be an astronaut. Oh. I wanted to be president. Oh. I wanted to be an engineer. Every answer was somebody wanted to build something productive. And now the studies are showing that Gen Z wants to be platform influencers on YouTube.

[Carrie Newhoff]

All right? I want to be a YouTuber. I want to be tick Tock influencer and, you know, have a private jet.

[Todd Wilson]

I don't want to just like, not everybody. I don't want to just be a naysayer on that, but it's like, how do. How do we release and equip that, but do it in a way that we're also staying core to disciple making Jesus saturation. Like, what these things? And I Think we've got a major challenge of that balancing act.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Yeah, I agree with you. You know, a cynical take on our conversation or the history of the church growth movement would be great. The boomers ruined the housing market, they ruined the economy, and now they're ruining the church and we inherit all this. But the other thing a mentor once said to me that I've never forgotten and try to live by, you can fight it or you can fund it. So if you're a little bit of an older leader, you're getting up there, you're Gen X, you're a boomer, you're a silent generation. You can fight it or you can fund it and fuel it. And one thing I love about Gen Z, Gen Alpha is they love talking to older generations. They are looking for wisdom. And I think there's a partnership, not for us to pull all the strings, but to enable, equip and celebrate when this new wine gets poured in and maybe there's some new wine skins along the way. Well, the book is called how do we get here? Looking back to look Forward. I am glad we did this seminary class on church history, Church growth, movement history. It really helped me, Todd. So the book's out. Where is it available? Where can people learn more? Where can they find you?

[Todd Wilson]

Yep. The main website will be church-growth.org and Carrie, what I'm most excited about is there's going to be a wiki form of it. And here's, here's why. I mean, you can get it in digital or print copies from Amazon and the different places, but the wiki version, here's what's exciting. You're not going to be able to read this book without seeing where you fit in the story. Anybody who reads the book, my editor on the book told me I can tell you the page in the book that I entered the story into this.

[Carrie Newhoff]

I had the same feeling. I'm like, oh my gosh, this is my era. I see it, I see it. I remember these people.

[Todd Wilson]

My process of endorsements right now, Carrie, is really fascinating compared to all the other books I've done. Instead of asking people to write an endorsement, I'm asking them to review the book and find a place to put a quote in the book. Because anybody that's been part of even 10 plus years of this, they have part of the story. So what I'm really hoping happens with this is that what starts out as a relatively long history book becomes a longer and longer and longer living, breathing. I want people to go and actually fill in the gaps in the book. So this is. Think of it as a living, breathing book on the wiki or the website. Church growth.org will have the. You know, where you can download it or purchase it.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Todd, your gift. I gotta tell you, I don't know that too many people could have written this book. And I needed it. I needed it a long time ago. I'm glad you wrote it and I'm really grateful for the unique gift you are to me and to the church. So thank you so much for today. I couldn't be more grateful.

[Todd Wilson]

Well, thank you, Carrie. I appreciate you letting me be on. And this is officially my celebration of being done with the book. So thank you for being on two

[Carrie Newhoff]

years of your life and hundreds of hours of interviews. And I mean, a lot of this is living history. So thank you for doing it.

[Todd Wilson]

Thank you, Cary.

[Carrie Newhoff]

Well, I told you it was the seminary class you never got. I hope you enjoyed that. And we have show notes for you. Todd and I mentioned a lot of stuff. You'll find the link to his book and a whole lot more over in my Art of Leadership Academy. You can join for free. Join 20,000 church leaders. We have great conversations in the academy and you can join for free by going to theartofleadershipacademy.com or clicking the link in the description of this episode. It'll take you directly there and come join the conversation. Move from the crowd to the core and we will discuss good topics like this. And we'll do it without the usual noise of the Internet. We have a lot of great conversations there. Well, next episode, I've got Vic Green and Robby Galady and they are talking about what happens when the playbook that you have been using for years stops working, particularly on discipleship and evangelism and revival. Talk about all those things now. The best way to make sure you don't miss it is to hit follow. Wherever you're listening, wherever you're watching, follow, subscribe. I want to thank you. I mean, it's such a privilege to be able to do this and to take it in so many details, different directions. Today was definitely a different direction. But I do hope that it was helpful to you and to your team. We'll catch you next time on the podcast. Remember, if this was meaningful, leave us a rating and review. Share it with a friend and maybe post it to social. We are really grateful for that. You can tag me. I'm on Instagram. Carrie Newhoff over there. I hope our time together today helped you identify and break a growth barrier you're facing.