In this episode we talk with Jim Molloy about rural church planting, leadership pipeline and strategy for church multiplication in Canada. Also, listen right to the end to hear us ask Jim some rapid fire questions that we received by some of our listeners.
In this episode we talk with Jim Molloy about rural church planting, leadership pipeline and strategy for church multiplication in Canada. Also, listen right to the end to hear us ask Jim some rapid fire questions that we received by some of our listeners.
Transcript of Podcast by Multiply Network
Created to champion church multiplication, provide learning and inspire new disciple-
making communities across Canada
2018 – Jim Molloy
Paul Fraser: Welcome to the Multiply Network podcast, a podcast created to champion church multiplication, provide learning and inspire new disciple-making communities across Canada.
Hi there. Welcome to the Multiply Network podcast, episode #8. Merry Christmas to you as well. I hope you are ramping up for an awesome Christmas season, full of rest and relaxation. I know how busy Christmas can be. I hope you are looking forward to it. I hope you are looking forward to this podcast today. My friend Jim Molloy, from the Maritimes District, is going to be sharing some of his thoughts. We do a rapid fire question round at the end. You’ll want to stick around to the end to hear about that. Man, I love this guy. He’s got a lot of great things to say. So that’s going to be coming up in just a little bit.
We’re going to be launching some new things in 2019, which again, isn’t that far away. So I hope you are going to stick around for more Multiply Network stuff. Check us out. Paoc.org/multiplynetwork for more stuff.
Here’s the podcast with Jim Molloy.
I’m really excited to have Jim Molloy on the Multiply Network podcast. I didn’t get a bio from Jim so I had to go online and look at Google to see what he’s up to these days. I found out he is a luxury real estate agent in Toronto.
Jim Molloy:
A. (Laughter) Is that true?
Q. Yes, it is true. He’s part of a bio-tech company in Texas, I think. A master black belt. He’s also a property manager in Auckland, New Zealand and he’s also here as a representative of the Multiply Network lead team. He works in the District Office of the Maritimes. He’s an author. I think he blogs, does some writing, and he’s a great friend of mine. Jim Molloy, welcome to the Multiply Network podcast.
A. Hey Paul. Nice to be here. I’m glad I could take some time off my real estate business to be with you today.
Q. It is one of my ‘go-tos’ that I use when I am MC-ing weddings. I look up people’s names and it usually gets a good laugh or two.
A. I have never Googled myself. I should have done that.
Q. You should have done that. That’s a rookie mistake.
A. I didn’t know it was such a big deal.
Q. It is a big deal. So thanks for joining us today. We’re going to talk church planting. But let’s start off with: Where do you live? What do you do? And maybe tell us a little bit of how you came to Christ, called to ministry and that type of thing?
A. Sure. I live in a little town, actually outside of a little town, called Truro, Nova Scotia, which is about an hour north of Halifax, Nova Scotia. I live outside of Truro in a little town called Valley; population 6. So I live there with me and a few people. I’ve been there for fifteen years. I work in District Office and our District Office is located in Truro and we look after 3 provinces; so Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and PEI is our region. We have sixty-five churches and currently we have 3 church plants in the hopper that are going well. That’s what I do.
I am focused mostly in my office on Church Planting, of course, and Next Generation Ministry and Leadership Development. That’s kind of where I live and whatever else gets thrown my way. We’re a smaller District so everybody has to carry some things that are outside of our portfolio. That’s what I spend most of my days doing.
Q. How did you come to Christ; called to ministry? Back us up to teenage Jim Molloy?
A. Well, I was a pretty cool kid. I was pretty impressive.
Q. I guess you were!
A. Yes, I was something. I actually have a great story of coming to Christ. I came to Christ as a child. I have lived my whole life serving Christ with, you know, a few dark days in the middle. What happened was we were living in a small town called Port Hawkesbury, which is on an island in the eastern part of Nova Scotia. It is a small town of a couple of thousand people. My parents had moved there to work in a pulp mill; my dad did. There was no Pentecostal church in the town. At first, and my parents weren’t church goers. But in 1969, a gentleman by the name of Gordon O’Coin came and planted, tried to start to plant, a church in Port Hawkesbury. One day he, or somebody from the church, came and knocked on my mother’s door. She answered the door ,holding little one-year old me, and got an invitation to a new church plant in the town. She decided to go, and she brought me. And then, 2 years later when my sister was born, brought my sister. So right from Day One of that church plant, I was carried to the church. I grew up in that church and I was called to ministry in that church.
I lived my faith experience in that one church until I was 18 and then I went off to Bible School in Peterborough. So I am an indirect result of good multiplication. Back in those days, it was a little different. Gordon O’Coin was just sponsored by a couple of churches to come. He planted roots in the town and then a couple of other churches - you know, within 2 or 3 hour’s drive - came. They started meeting in a home, and then eventually, they built a church building with the help of men and women from churches within a 3-hour radius. They would come in on the weekends or evenings and help construct the building. That became the church I grew up in. I served there as a student and then graduated from High School and went on to Bible School.
Q. Such a cool story, because it is going to lead really well into our conversation about church multiplication. I think we have this tendency to think that church planting can only happen in cities, and here we have a great example of it happening in a small town and leaving an impact. And how many years later that church, now replanted again, but it is still in that community.
Talk to us a little bit about rural planting and maybe some of the misconceptions about it.
A. Well, there are some real advantages to rural planting. It depends on how you view your numbers. If you are in a rural church plant and you are going in expecting a long service of 200, 300, 400 hundred people, you are going to be disappointed. But if you go into a small town and you start small, either in a home setting, or you find a few believers you can start something with, or a larger launch - both can work. The advantage is that, in a small town, the church plant is known right away. So in Halifax, we have a new church plant, but only a very small percentage of Halifax even know that a new church plant is there, even though the plant is going very well – It is Nova, in Halifax. They have 300 to 400 people attending. In a small town though, if you have twenty people, you are known. We have a small church plant in a little town in Nova Scotia here, and right now it is about twenty-five or thirty people. Everybody in the town knows that when the mayor of the town wants something done, she calls that little church to come and serve at her community events. So there’s a real ability to be known quickly in a small town and build relationships. That can actually increase the rate of growth quite quickly, just by the ease of exposure that happens in small towns. We have discovered that can be an advantage.
The other thing with small towns is that almost any methodology works. So in our case, we have discovered that if and when you do a large launch - and large might be a hundred people or fifty people - or you can do home church, or you can just do some tenderizing events for a year as a kind of a relational planter. Those things all work in small towns. As the planter gets to be known, people begin to come. It has some advantages. In some ways, I think it is a little easier in small towns than it is in a large city.
Q. In the Maritimes, that’s your story because there aren’t a lot of large cities out there. I mean, Halifax would be the largest city that you would have.
A. Right.
Q. So, why don’t you talk to us a little bit about some of the opportunities to plant out in the Maritimes. I know you guys are very focused on that; both revitalization and multiplication. What are some opportunities out in the Maritimes for people, maybe listening? They’re like “yeah, I feel called to plant a church. Is the Maritimes open?” Send one, send all. Why don’t you talk to us a little bit about that?
A. Sure. We actually have ---
We’re ready. We have our systems, our processes and our funding ready. What we need is leaders. We have a pretty good financial investment for an entrepreneurial planter or a church that wants to plant a church. So we have multiplication money. We have multiplication systems and processes. What we need is leaders.
The other thing we have is multiplication points of interest or towns of interest or cities of interest. As a District, we have picked 7 different communities, where we would like to see our next 7 church plants. We would be open, of course, to a planter coming in and saying they want to plant in a different town than our 7. That would be no problem. But as a District team, we have picked 7 communities where we would, if we could have our way, we would put new churches in these towns. We have listed them. They are a combination of rural small town plants and a couple of them in the larger centers, like a Moncton, New Brunswick or a Saint John, New Brunswick. And of course, Halifax can use many more plants. We have small towns like New Glasgow. That’s just about an hour from Truro, where we would like to plant a church. So we have those opportunities.
The other opportunity we have is in places where we have actually closed churches. For various reasons, churches have closed. A great example of this would be Campbellton, New Brunswick, where the Campbellton church, when it was opened, actually sent out a lot of leaders across the Fellowship, including former General Superintendents came from there. Lots of leaders have come from that church. But that church has closed. But we would love to go back there with a new church plant.
The town has changed, so what was an English church, we would now plant as a French church, because there are a lot of French-speaking people. Campbellton has changed. So we would go back there with a French planter if we could find one. We have the systems, we have the money, we just need the leaders. We have the towns of target. We just need the people to come and plant them.
We’re leaning a little bit into recruiting here in the District and asking our current churches to consider multiplication in nearby towns. That is probably going to be the main part of our strategy, is to have local churches get a church multiplication burden.
Q. Yes.
A. Go down the road an hour and plant in that town.
Q. This is something right across the board. You sit on national teams. We have talked about it: Leadership pipeline.
A. Right.
Q. It’s the biggest need right now in church multiplication. It will be our biggest need in five to ten years for existing churches, as the leaders who are now in their sixties may be looking to retire. So, we’ve got an off-ramp. But we don’t have a very good on-ramp for leadership. We have Bible Colleges. They are doing great and those things. But there’s just not going to be enough. We’re not pumping enough, even at our Bible Colleges. I’m grateful for them, but what are we going to do, Jim? What are some of your thoughts about filling our leadership pipeline? What are some of the things you are thinking about in the Maritimes?
A. I think there are a couple of places where our future planters are living. I think one of them is in staff roles - People who are serving as kid’s pastors and youth pastors and associate pastors and worship pastors in churches, but they are not the lead pastor. That’s where I’m discovering, when people start to kick around the idea of planting, a lot of those tire kickers are actually people who are in support or secondary roles now, that are just getting enough – they feel – just enough ministry experience under their belt to step out and lead multiplication. I think that is where some of those people are living right now. We just have to probably talk a little more often with those who are in secondary roles about multiplication. Of course, if they can multiply from their current church, if their current church would take on the multiplication mandate, everyone would win.
In the Maritimes, we’re probably going to have to think, and this might be a little bit controversial, we’re going to have to think about non-credential or lay church planters. People who are great leaders in the local church, who would come under the authority of a local church, but who are not afraid to do the heavy lifting of planting while being under authority and being accountable for what they do. And, of course, we would try to move them to credentialing. But I think there are people - second career people, or people who have margins in their careers that would allow them to plant. We just have to have the apparatus around them to make it happen.
I think there is something in there for us. I certainly don’t have it figured out but I do hear some lay people, non-credential people, talking about being involved in multiplication. Some of them are great leaders in their careers and who would do very well as planters. So figuring out how to stick handle through that, I think there is something there for us in the Maritimes.
Q. And maybe those who have a pension at fifty-five, you know. They have worked for twenty-five or thirty years, maybe, and got a full pension and could retire. We’ve got some of those. I know there is a story of a retired police officer planting in a rural town here. It’s fantastic. I think we need to expand our search, rather than just the typical church planter we think we see on Instagram. I think we have to expand our search.
A. Right.
Q. Why don’t you talk to us a little bit about what are some of the characteristics? You don’t have to have all of these, but what would be some of the things you would be looking for in a church planter as far as characteristics?
A. We have seen across the country and of course across our Districts, the planters who have done well and planters who haven’t done well. The ones that do well seem to have a couple of things that I have noticed. First of all, they tend to be willing to be accountable, to be under authority, to be under a church, to work in partnership with a District, to work in partnership with a coach, and they just have a little bit of a thirst to be with someone, not to be so entrepreneurial that they are solo. But the ones who have real success really put themselves into a lot of relationships and a lot of accountability. That seems to work. They seem to do really well.
The other characteristic, of course, is they have to be full of faith. They have to believe that God is going to do it, that God is going to show up, that God is going to help, that God is going to provide. They have to have, at their core, the belief that God is going to be with them.
Q. Right.
A. Others, if they step out, they sort of wonder if God is going to come along. They don’t tend to walk in authority or walk in confidence, because they have this little insecurity about it. ‘I don’t know if God is going to come through here.’ But our best planters just have this really wild conviction that God is going to show up and do it.
There are probably lots of things. But probably the third thing that comes to mind is tenacity. Just raw grit. We’ll stick to it. They don’t, when discouragement comes, let it beat them to the ground. They have the ability to brush the dust off and go at it again. Brush the dust off and go at it again. Brush the dust off and go at it again; over and over, time and time again ---
Q. Love it.
A. That tenacity. We’ve got a couple of planters right now that are in different levels of success, in terms of numbers. But a couple of them are like a dog with a bone. They are not going to be thwarted by the obstacles that are happening. They try one thing and it doesn’t work. “Well, we’ll try something else.” So they have a real stick-to-it-ness.
If you don’t have that as a planter, and discouragement becomes your reality, you tap out. Right?
Q. Yes. You’ve got to outlast the issues, you know. A church planter can’t look at this and go “wow, if it doesn’t work within a year” ---
Man, it takes up to five years, longer in some cases, before the church is self-sustaining. You’ve got to go in with that mind set of perseverance and grit; tenacity. I love that.
A. Right.
Q. So someone ---
I’m here in Edmonton. I drive twenty minutes in any direction and there’s a slight cultural difference, even in Edmonton, our cities. They have very different parts. Edmonton, for example, or Toronto. Coming to the Maritimes is very different. So someone coming from Western Canada out to the Maritimes, would there be any cultural barriers? What do you think would be the differences, as you have been across Canada? Of course you live in the Maritimes. You have seen people from out west come east. Anything we need to be aware of coming out to the Maritimes?
A. Yes. A couple of things, I guess. There really are two different cultures in the Maritimes. We have a very distinct small-town culture, where relationships are high value. Kitchen parties are our thing. Going out with the guys, hanging out with the girls; very relational type stuff in small towns. When you move into our larger cities, like Halifax, Moncton, Saint John and Fredericton - some of those larger centers - relationships seem to diminish a little bit and people tend to burrow a bit more into their own houses, and into their own careers, and be a little less people-y in our urban centers.
But you will offend Maritimers if you are coming in if you don’t show a lot of respect; if you think you are better than, or if you make references to how good things were in a different part of the country. That sort of rubs Maritimers the wrong way. It’s sort of like ‘this is a great place to live, a great place to work, a great place to raise a family’ and when somebody comes from the outside and compares their former reality to their new reality in a negative way, it kind of rubs people the wrong way.
There is also a thing in some Maritime communities, especially on PEI. If you are from away, you could live on PEI for forty years and still be ‘from away’.
Q. Really?
A. You are from away. That carries just a little bit of baggage with it, too. It takes a while to get in.
Q. Okay.
A. You don’t really launch out with “I’m from…” and name another province. You just sort of keep that to yourself and pretend you’ve always lived there.
Q. One of the things I know about Maritimers is they are very proud, and I totally agree. You’ve got to come in and respect them. Sure, talk about where you are at and talk about the great things about where you are. I’ve talked with some leaders who have moved to a different province or a different city and all they talk about is where they used to be and how awesome that was. It just sends the wrong message. So that’s good practical advice there.
A. The personality trait that really rubs the Maritimers wrong is arrogance. If a leader comes in and, as soon as they are perceived as arrogant or know-it-all, that particular trait in the Maritimes is really offensive. If you are a know-it-all and you go to the US or other parts of the country, you can get away with it a bit more. But for Maritimers, if they sniff the least little bit of arrogance, you get shut out pretty quick.
Q. Yes.
A. It is one of those things.
Q. I think it is probably true everywhere, but certainly in the Maritimes.
So, as you think about planting, one of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about lately - and I maybe will blog about it this month - is how the church needs to go from addition to multiplication. How do you get your new church plants to think about being a church planting church? How does that happen? Do you have stuff built into your strategy, like in the first five years they need to multiply? Have you given any thought about that? What can we do across Canada to get our new church plants thinking about multiplying and not just being sustaining, as if that was the success point?
A. As a District, we try to start to ask our planters right from Day One: “Where is your next planting place?” That might not even be a different town. That might just be a different people group. “Where’s your next?” Maybe even before they have their first launch service, we try to get our planters thinking about ‘If God really shows up here, and this thing really happens and in two years you are at two hundred people, where are you going next?’ I think our newest plant, which is Nova with Mike Miller, right from Day One he has already had his sights set on different areas and different ministries that he wants to plant out of Nova.
I think, for the planter, they have to make it a part of their language and their talk right from the start. We are a church, we are a Movement that plants churches. We’re not a church plant. We’re a church planting Movement. So we’ve got guys like Mike Miller or Dave Sawler, who didn’t move into town to plant a church. They moved into town to plant multiple points of ministry. That’s in their DNA.
I think planters need to think a little bit ‘If this thing is a real success; if this thing is a real success, where are we going next?’ And then live in that. Like, ‘This is going to be a real success and where are we going next?’ Even our smallest plant - and maybe it’s just the way planters think - even our smallest plant, she’s already thinking next town; right.
Q. Love it. Oh yeah.
A. She can’t do it yet, because she is still working on her current town. But that will happen if it is in the mind set.
Q. Even starting an Alpha in a town twenty minutes away. It doesn’t have to be a big launch strategy. A disciple-making community can start from a lot of different things for sure.
One of the things we talked about just prior to the podcast - and I thought this would be a good conversation point - is “How do we redirect passions of planters, when they might not fit the typical planter profile?” They are really excited about planting, but then all of a sudden, you do the assessments and some of the stuff doesn’t come back as strong as maybe they would like it. Why don’t you talk to the group here listening in? What are you guys doing? How are you approaching that?
A. Right. I have a couple of opinions on that. I’m not sure they are right, but I have opinions. One of the challenges I have is I don’t like our current planting approach to assessment. When you get a red light or a green light, whether you are a planter or you’re not, I don’t like the idea of shutting down anybody’s calling.
When I line up my inventory of skills and gifts, especially when I was young, somebody should have talked me out of this, because I don’t have the capacity. Right. But somehow God made up the difference, and I have been able to do some things in the kingdom. I am really cautious about telling somebody ‘no, you are not a planter.’ But what I would say is people who would be assessed as not a planter should always get ‘you’re not a planter yet’. There are some things anybody can do. One of those things would be partnerships. If you get a score that says ‘you are not a planter’ well, maybe that just means you need to be working with a planter or with a planting church or a multiplication point of ministry. Knock the solo entrepreneurial planter out of your thinking and think kingdom; think multiplication and roll within that rather than thinking ‘I’m going to be the superstar solo planter with three hundred people after my first year.’ Those are really rare people.
So I think I would try to talk those people into partnerships. They have stuff to bring, but I don’t think whether you are red-lighted or green-lighted ---
The other piece of it was, when you decide you are going to be a multiplier, I think you have to be ready to be the recipient of hard conversations, even more so than a person who is going to go in and pastor a church that has just previously been pastored by another pastor. I think there is a little nuance, a little difference that you have to, as a planter, be ready for some hard conversations. Because, by nature, you are going to make mistakes and, by nature, your personality is going to bump up against some things that just impede what you are trying to do. You need other voices who are not afraid to tell you, “Hey, when you said that you looked like a jerk.” “Hey, you are doing this out of ego.” Or “Hey, you really need to work on your administration.” People who get red-lighted that they can’t plant, if they can really be open to hard conversations, they could actually have a role to play in multiplication.
Q. Right. There’s lots of different thoughts about red light-green light on church planting. I think it also depends on the model, because most of our assessments are set up for one type of prototypical planter.
A. Right.
Q. But to have someone go into a town to be an incarnational missionary, that just starts in a house church, you are not asking them to have CRA applications ready right away. You are not asking for that. So I think it really does depend on the model of planting. So maybe there’s someone out there listening going, ‘oh, I only thought you had to pass this and you had to do that.’ And then you had to jump through fifteen more hoops and then they would think about whether or not you would be a planter. We’re trying to on- ramp people as much as we can in the Multiply Network.
I love your thoughts on that.
A. There are multiple roles in multiplication.
Q. Yes.
A. We can’t think about the entrepreneurial high charismatic planter. There are so many ways and different roles to get the job done. So if you don’t pass a certain type of assessment, that’s not a roadblock for you. That’s just a detour. Right.
Q. Yes. And you just redirect them.
A. Exactly.
Q. Great. So I want you to think beyond Maritimes now, Jim. Think about Canada, specifically the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. I think you have been in every District, for sure.
A. Sure.
Q. You’ve got a pretty good outlook on Canada. What do we need to do as a group, as a tribe, to move church multiplication systems forward? What do you think we need to be working on? Because I know other denominational leaders are listening to this podcast. They are thinking about systems. They are thinking about moving stuff forward. What do we need to do Jim?
A. That’s a pretty large question. Assuming that we have a foundation where we actually want to see lost people come to Jesus; assuming that is all in place - and I don’t think it is. I think many of our churches have got into a rhythm that is not missional, that doesn’t really care a lot about lost people. But if we had a core ethos that we are all about lost people. I think multiplication sort of happens naturally. It’s almost like an apple tree. The apple tree gets so full of nutrients it has no choice but to break out in apples. I think, as an assembly, if you are so full of that passion for lost people, multiplication is a natural outflow. It will happen by accident, based on our missional ethos. We would have no choice but to break out in apples.
On that systemic stuff, I think we have to think a little less about the entrepreneurial solo superstar planter, which we cherish and love. But we also have to think about multiplication from a local church level. I recently asked my pastors, in a group setting when I had a bunch of my leaders together, “If God came to you, in an audible voice, and said ‘you have to plant a church’, what would you do and where would you go?” Of those dozens of leaders in the room, every one of them instantly had an idea of what they would do and a place they would go.
That tells me that every church can be a planting church or be a multiplying church.
Q. Totally.
A. It might not be a new church, but we call it points of ministry. It might be a new point of ministry. It might be a Bible study down the road, or a coffee shop downtown. It might be a campus thing. It could be anything. But if most of our pastors, if God said to them ‘you have to multiply’, within minutes they could come up with the method and the place. So, the question is: ‘How do we uncap that?’ If I have sixty-five pastors of Maritime churches who could answer the question ‘Where would you go next?’, the question becomes ‘Why aren’t you going there?’
Q. Yes.
A. If we can find ways to open that lid, resource that idea - which I think is what the Multiplication Network does - that’s the idea, if we could lift the lid on all those possibilities ---
It’s churches that multiply in this day, not necessarily people or individuals that go solo. I think if our churches could think, “There’s a town an hour away. We have some resources and some people we could do something. We could do an Alpha. We could do a home group. We could do a hard launch. We could do multiple things.” At least in my District. Maybe I’m putting all my stuff across the country. But, in my District, churches have to multiply churches in my region. And I suspect it is the same for the country.
Q. Definitely. To me, I’m a little less on the way it has to be one way or the other. I’m more both/and rather than either/or. I think there are entrepreneurial planters that are able to do it.
A. We need them.
Q. We need them because they are going to go ---
I think you identified a couple of really important things. First of all, the idea of are we serious about reaching Canadians. Because if that isn’t our heartbeat ---
You read the scriptures. They planted the gospel and then a church grew. We’re planting churches hoping the gospel will grow.
A. Right.
Q. So, I think, if we just had a real gospel-centered heart and mind going “There’s a town that is not hearing about Jesus. We’ve got to do something.” - not “The District needs to do something” or “Someone else needs to do something.” And the second part is, I think, people need to understand they already have permission.
A. Right.
Q. I can almost guarantee that God is asking them to go to that town.
A. Right. Right. Exactly.
Q. I don’t think He’s going “No, no, don’t go there. Don’t go there. I don’t like those people.”
A. So as leaders we have to uncap that. Whatever those things are, and if it’s money, it’s money. If it’s people, it’s people. If it’s fear, it’s fear. We have to uncap that, because I think that is how multiplication will happen. Multiplication is what we do just for fun. I think it is an answer to a problem.
Q. Totally.
A. Not enough people know Jesus, so the answer is multiplication!
Q. Hello! It is totally true, man. Great thoughts on that.
Well, we’ve come to the rapid fire round. So we’re going to give you ---
A. That’s new?
Q. Yes, we just started it. I’m starting it with this podcast. Rapid fire question round. You don’t know what the questions are going to be. So some of them will have to do with ministry and leadership. Other things are just totally random to get to know Jim.
A. Okay. Shoot.
Q. First one. Coke or Pepsi?
A. Definitely Pepsi. It has more sugar.
Q. Okay.
A. I’m all about the sugar, baby.
Q. Okay. Cats or dogs?
A. I hate them both.
Q. You hate them both?
A. I hate cats more. I have a dog which I wish would move away.
Q. Okay. Do you have a pet of choice?
A. No. I’m a low maintenance person so anything, even fish - they were a pain because they had to be fed.
Q. Okay. So golfing or fishing, what would you rather do?
A. Fishing 100%. I could fish every day all my life long. Golf: hate it. I’m terrible at it.
Q. Okay. Do you own a pair of skinny jeans?
A. Skinny jeans?
Q. Yes.
A. No. I have slim-fit jeans. But the problem is I’m not slim so they don’t work well.
Q. So they look like they’re skinny?
A. They look like skinny jeans. Skinny and me don’t really get along. Skinny is not my Feng Shui at all.
Q. Okay. Tim’s or Starbucks?
A. Tim’s for coffee; Starbucks for the fancier drinks.
Q. Okay.
A. Coffee for coffee it would be Tim’s, actually.
Q. Okay. Good. And I feel as a Maritimer, you kind of have to say that because there’s a Tim’s on, literally, every corner.
A. Yes. And Starbucks for me is an hour away.
Q. Do you follow any blogs, other than the Multiply Network blog?
A. That’s by far the best one that is worth following. I wouldn’t miss an episode.
I follow blogs as they pop up about specific topics. I’m click-hesitant so I’ve got to be really interested in the title before I click. There are a few I check in on regularly. Carey Nieuwhof’s is probably one that I kind of listen to regularly.
Q. Nieuwhof.
A. But the rest of them are like ‘oh, I see it’. If I see it pop up, I will give it a listen.
Q. So no podcasts other than Carey Nieuwhof?
A. Not really.
Q. Okay.
A. Again, nothing I follow. It is hit and miss. I guess I’m fortunate. I have a lot of people sending me a lot of episodes of different things. They say, “You should listen to this.” And then I try to, so I get to listen to many, but I don’t follow any.
Q. Okay. Any books you have read lately that are good?
A. I’ve got all kinds of books that are in my stack to read. The one I’m reading right now is called Marching Off the Map. It is about educating and preparing Millennials, Generation Z people. So that’s the one I’m in right now.
I would have to look through my list of books to see what I have just read. That’s the one I’m in right now. I’ve got a lot of books in a stack to read.
Q. Yes. It’s hard to get at them.
Last question is: Do you have an ugly Christmas sweater?
A. Yes, I do.
Q. There’s almost a lament as you said that.
A. I actually like it. I haven’t pulled it out this year yet. I think it has something with Scrooge on the front of it. Maybe a ‘bah humbug’ sort of terminology on it. I’m the grumpy old man at Christmas. I don’t like the decorations and all that kind of thing.
Q. You don’t, eh?
A. I’m a quiet soul.
Q. So Joy to the World, you’re not singing it with a smile on your face?
A. No. Christmas carols are not my thing. Decorating the Christmas tree is a painful exercise.
Q. So if you want to follow this ray of sunshine on social media, where do we look for you? @jimmolloy?
A. Yes. Jimcmolloy.
Q. Jim C. Molloy.
A. And Molloy is spelled M-o-l-l-o-y.
Q. Yes. Jim, it is so good being here. You are a great friend; a great leader doing great things for the kingdom. Thanks for your time and have yourself a merry little Christmas!
A. Thanks Paul. Thanks for connecting. And thanks for leading the Multiplication Network. I am so excited we have this initiative in our Fellowship now. I think we’re going to take new ground. I appreciate your ministry.
Q. C’mon. Thanks man. Appreciate it.
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