Welcome to the unSeminary podcast. Today we’re talking with Shawn and Sonny Hennessy, from Life Church Green Bay in Wisconsin. Shawn and Sonny are also co-hosts of The Rise After the Fall podcast and together founded The Exchange Collaborative.

The highs and lows of ministry, and the trials of life can threaten to destroy pastors and church leaders if they don’t address their own brokenness. Everyone experiences trauma and has weaknesses that can lead to a fall. But that’s not the end of the story. Listen in as Shawn and Sonny talk about how to find healing and move toward restoration after a fall.

So many hide before they fall. // There are so many pastors in the midst of a fall or in danger of a fall who hide, either in pride or fear, and don’t reach out to someone for help. They may feel that they don’t have someone they can go to, or they may fear losing their position and livelihood, especially if they are the senior leader.
Step away when needed. // God has used Shawn and Sonny’s own brokenness and restoration process to found The Exchange Collaborative where they come alongside other pastors and church leaders who are struggling. In addition to offering resources such as The Rise After the Fall podcast, Shawn and Sonny have put together a program for pastoral restoration. As part of this program, one of the things they offer to pastors who are at a point where they really want help is a financial incentive to walk away from their ministry for a year.
Fake it until we make it or fall. // Some of the biggest pastoral falls come from the things people are ashamed and embarrassed about, like financial or sexual impropriety. A lot of times our insecurity causes us to hide our own doubts about ourselves, and we try to fake it until we make it. So as church leaders we actually fail the most by not admitting our weaknesses in the first place, and then not setting up safeguards to prevent our falls.
Walk in repentance. // The first step toward healing and restoration is admitting that we are broken. The pastoral restoration program is not for the person who just wants to save face and preserve themselves. Rather it’s for those who want to walk in repentance. It helps leaders who are broken dig down to the root cause of why they took a wrong step in the first place.
Paths for help. // Everybody’s needs are different so there are a couple of different paths in the pastoral restoration program. One option is for people to come to Green Bay for 30 days to a year and live there, going through an intense restoration process. The Exchange Collaborative offers housing, a job, a church they can attend, and the Journey to Wholeness course to work through. It is an honest and open process that will help leaders, and their families, defragment and reconnect.
Other options for restoration. // There are other options for those who can’t come to Green Bay for a year for the restoration process. Shawn and Sonny can fly to pastors and work with them and their families while they are still serving in their ministry role. There is also an option for 2-3 day intensives at various locations. One is at the Living Waters Retreat in Arizona on June 23-25, 2022. Additionally, you can contact Shawn or Sonny directly through their website if you need to talk with them about help you may need.
Create a culture of vulnerability. // As a church leader, you can create a culture where people on your staff will feel safe opening up about their struggles before their life goes off the rails. Have conversations about your struggles and how you are addressing them. You don’t need to bare your whole soul, but can start by speaking generally to lay down a foundation for your team. Talk time to pray for one another. The Journey to Wholeness course offered at The Exchange Collaborative website is also available for your staff to walk through together.

You can learn more about The Rise After the Fall podcast, the pastoral restoration program, and other resources at www.theexchangecollaborative.com. Find out more about Life Church Green Bay at www.lifechurchgreenbay.com.

Thank You for Tuning In!

There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, but you chose unSeminary, and I’m grateful for that. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it by using the social media buttons you see at the left hand side of this page. Also, kindly consider taking the 60-seconds it takes to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, they’re extremely helpful when it comes to the ranking of the show and you can bet that I read every single one of them personally!

Lastly, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, to get automatic updates every time a new episode goes live!

Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Well hey, friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. You know every week here on the podcast we try to bring you a church leader who will both inspire and equip you, but today we’ve got two! Two for the price of one, friends. Super excited to have a return guest. Well you know when we have return guests, that means I love what they have to say and want to expose them to you. We’re 600 episode in we have only done a handful of return guests. So super excited for that. You need to lean in today. We’ve got Shawn and Sonny Hennessy from a fantastic church – Life Church in Wisconsin. Shawn is the senior pastor. He’s international guest speaker, author, blogger. He’s a chaplain to the Green Bay Packers—are you a shareholder though? That’s the real question—and the co-founder of The Exchange. And then we’ve got Sonny – she’s a lead pastor at Life Church Green Bay and CEO of The Exchange Brand. Together they co-host a podcast called The Rise After the Fall, speaking really to church leaders ah, who have taken a step too far, who have fallen and really about this whole area of pastoral restoration. Sonny, Shawn, welcome to the show. So glad you’re here.

Sonny Hennessy — Thank you.

Shawn Hennessy — Thank you, and yes I am a shareholder actually.

Rich Birch — This is… oh you are? Okay I wondered.

Shawn Hennessy — Yes, yes.

Rich Birch — That’s great. Wow. I’m not sure what that means. Like I don’t know does that mean you’re like someday you can, if they sell, you get money? Is that what that means? I don’t know.

Shawn Hennessy — There’s no no monetary impact. You can go once a year to the shareholders meeting and you can listen with 75,000 or so of your closest friends to what’s going to happen.

Rich Birch — Love it. That’s that’s so good. Sonny, why don’t we start with you kind of filling out the the picture a little bit. Kind of talk to us about Life Church – give us to kind of bring us up to speed on that to kind of tell us a little bit of the of your story. How you know how Life Church is and give us a bit of that picture.

Sonny Hennessy — Well, we’ve been at Life Church almost ten years in Green Bay, Wisconsin, of course, and we find it to be the greatest work we’ve ever done when it comes to ministry. And it came after a meteoric rise and a fall. And we almost lost our marriage – ie. we both messed up enough to to almost walk away from our marriage. And it’s after that that we saw God do the most in our life. Ah Life Church, we basically like relaunched it ten years ago with about 80 people, and a little building. And we were three times on the fastest growing churches in America Outreach list. One year as the second fastest growing, so literally it has been a ride. And then the pandemic hit, and we were able to really sit back, lean back and say, what do we want the next ten years to look like? Well we want to be pastors but we also want to help pastors who thought their life was over at the time of the fall, their fall, their step back, and realize it’s not the end. It’s never the end with God.

Rich Birch — Mmm-hmm, yeah; I love it. So I um I it seems like for about a year I had everyone who I knew in ministry said to me, hey hey have you—and I already knew where it was going—they’re like have you listened to that Mars Hill Podcast? Like have you heard about that conversation? It’s like if I feel like I couldn’t get away from it and um, you know I had friends that were on the team there, and so actually to be honest I haven’t listened to it. Because I’m like I, listen I was knew people in the mid...