Modern Church Leader
Hear pastors share what's working in their churches. Welcome to Modern Church Leader, a show for church leaders to learn business strategies, leadership skills, church tech tips, and generosity. Tune in for powerful interviews to help you grow your church to be more effective, efficient, and powerful for the kingdom of God. For more information, visit https://www.mclconference.com/
Modern Church Leader
Dynamic Leadership Strategies for Church Growth with Tim Stevens
With 39 years of ministry and church leadership, Tim Stevens joins us to uncover the secrets behind thriving church teams and seamless leadership transitions. Plus, get a sneak peek into the upcoming Modern Church Leader Conference and the dynamic leadership strategies that can transform your church's culture.
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uh, hey guys, welcome to another episode of modern church leader. I'm here with tim stevens today. Tim, how's it going, man? It's going great looking forward to this conversation all the way, all the way from chicago. I like your background too, by the way. Is that like on the wall, or is that?
Speaker 1:it is not a digital background, it's an actual wall print thing. Try trifecta artwork of some kind, that's awesome.
Speaker 2:Um. Well, man, uh, it's fun getting to know you. You've uh been around. You worked in churches for a number of years. Uh, you worked in church staffing. Now you're off doing kind of your own thing, that you've started over the last couple of years doing consulting for churches. So I love maybe you can just give us your story. How did you get into church, working for church and kind of all the way fast forward to today?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was actually reflecting on this recently because this past two weeks ago I was passing my 39th year in ministry, or ministry adjacent. So I spent the first nine years working in a nonprofit organization and this organization focused on revival and renewal in the church and so we traveled around in teams across the country and would spend one, two, three weeks in a church pouring into them. And then I did that for nine years, met my wife there, started having babies, decided traveling around the country wasn't a good idea that season. So we settled in, started attending this church plant. It had just started in a movie theater in northern Indiana. We were living in southwest Michigan, so this is about 20 minutes from us. It's called Granger Community Church and we just found it refreshing. It was at that time you know this was like in 92, 93, it was a church, you know, reaching unchurched and we'd never heard of that before. So it was refreshing, a new concept, and we just fell in love with the vision and they invited me to join the team. I think I was the fifth staff person. We had about 200 people coming and stayed there for 20 years, spent the next 20 years of my life, of our lives, pouring into that place Was the executive pastor there. Church grew to about 6,000 in weekly attendance. It was crazy. It's one of those seasons you've probably in that where you like every day you wake up and you realize we have like we've never been here before, none of us know what we're doing. We just got to figure it out 100, yes, yes, yeah. So that was a fantastic season. And, um, and towards the end of that 20 years, I met a guy named william vanderbloomen who, long story short, ended up asking me to come to move to Houston from northern Indiana. So big, big move, big cultural move, climate move, all kinds of things and moved there in 2014 to be the vice president of consulting at Vanderbloomen. Love the time there.
Speaker 1:I was there for six years, got to pour into churches, work with a ton of churches on transition, staffing, transitions, a lot of succession planning, as well as leading the team of consultants that are there, who are many are still very close friends. And then during that season, I was working with a church called Willow Creek, which I bet a lot of your listeners have heard of, and they'd gone through a horrible leadership scandal. They invited us in to help them with their senior pastor search. Also, long story short, over a period of about nine months, my heart just really became knit with them and their elders. And after they chose their next senior pastor, he called me and said hey, would you come be the executive pastor and let's turn this around together? And, man, that was a decision I made in about eight days, in the midst of a COVID shutdown. This was April 2020. So we did all of our interviews and Zoom, dating over digital airwaves. But it was the right decision, went up there One of the hardest things I've ever done to just walk into a staff that's just broken and hurting and a church that's just been through the ringer.
Speaker 1:And I told Dave when I joined the team. I said I don't see myself retiring from here. I really want to help rebuild and get this thing thriving again, but ultimately I want to go back into church consulting because I love pouring myself into the Big C Church, right, and so I did that for four years and then last summer I walked away. We could talk all day about just cool stories of what God's doing at Willow Creek. Right now it's still my home church. It's still where I attend, but stepped off the team there about a year ago and now working with churches, again full-time. Leading Smart is the name of the company. Did that as a side hustle for about 20 years and then just went full-time a year ago.
Speaker 2:Tell us, give us the Leading Smart pitch. The leading smart pitch Like how do you help churches? What's the primary focus?
Speaker 1:I'm working primarily with senior pastors and leadership teams, senior teams at churches, on a few different things, but a lot of it comes down to, like, the health of the team. I've got a strong passion and belief that the health of the organization and the efficacy impact of the church is directly connected to how healthy that leadership team is. So really focus on that and try to bring health to that team you know health so that they're able to have great, great conversations. They have trust with each other, they can challenge each other, they can really wrestle um, uh ideas to the ground, they commit to their decisions, um, and they actually see results. So that's a big focus.
Speaker 1:I do a lot of work with churches on succession. Um, a lot of these are either founding pastors or longtime pastors who are like I think I'm, you know, I think I'm at the end of the line here over the next two, three, four or five years, and then I just jump in and work with them over time to help them not just put together a plan but actually work the plan. And then we're doing a lot of work with churches on staff culture as well and helping build healthy culture. Not, I think it starts at the leadership team, but all the way through the organization, which was a core piece of what of the work I did when I was at Willow.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's cool man, you, you, you do not look that old, so you must've started. You know this whole journey you just described when you were like 10 or 12 years old.
Speaker 2:I was eight actually that's pretty cool. Well, I mean, I love the idea of like creating healthy teams and kind of what you're doing, like how do you come in? Like you know, do churches usually call you up and they're like, hey, I got issues, come help us, or is it a different version of that? You know how does it all start, and then I'd love to we can kind of go from there on, like how you help assess teams and all that.
Speaker 1:It's one of two things usually. Sometimes it's a specific help us with a specific thing. So it's, you know, help us with succession. Working with a church right now, that's just helping us, you know, similar to Willow, maybe not as headline worthy, but going through some pretty significant transition with leadership and crisis in their church. And so coming in and just helping them, you know, work through that, make a decision. That's one way.
Speaker 1:The other way that I'm finding more common is in two different churches, both of them pretty large. They both have staffs that exceed 200 or 300. The lead pastor, the senior pastor, is saying I need someone to come alongside me and just help me think, and so I'll come in two or three days a month and just spend time with him, with their leadership team, just helping them solve whatever the problems are in front of them at that particular season. So it could be structure, it could be right seat, right bus. One of the churches just said hey, one of our campuses is experiencing some turmoil. We'd love you to just come in and spend a few days with the team at that campus and just see if you can help unpack it, unravel it for us so we can help them get to a place of health again.
Speaker 1:So, that's um, that's probably you know. More than 50% of my work is working in those kinds of situations where it's not so much fix a problem but like come help find solutions for the challenges over a long period of time. Right.
Speaker 2:All right, um, yeah, that's that's fascinating. So they, I mean do All right. Yeah, that's that's fascinating. So they, I mean do you find in that, like, everything's different, or is there like, even though there's various issues, your way of kind of coming in and helping? You have like a like a playbook that helps to uncover things, get to the bottom of stuff and then start putting solutions in place?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I'm a I'm a Patrick Lencioni junkie, so, uh, all of his books are my playbook. Um, to be honest to you know, share industry secret here, but, uh, but, and he comes from a place, uh, same place. Uh, sure, I learned it from him, uh, that the health starts at the top and it starts with that leadership team. So that's my bias when I come in and like we're trying to solve problems. A lot of it's just discovery initially and just figuring out what's going on. But I'm looking to see, like, how healthy you know the right people on that leadership team, is it formed right? Making sure it's not an echo chamber, you know, sometimes you come in and it's especially church has been around for a while. It's, you know, the same four guys that have been doing it forever. So trying to, you know if it's possible, trying to bring in some younger voices, some diversity of thought onto the team and then kind of build some practices, some disciplines into that group so that they can begin to operate.
Speaker 2:And what that does is it just brings.
Speaker 1:You know, usually you find in the organization, lower in the organization than the leadership team, you find people that are confused, you know they feel like there's lack of communication, they don't know how to make decisions around here, they don't know who to go for what, and if you can clarify it at the top, it just brings a whole lot of security and stability through the organization. People that are like I don't care if I'm in the room or not, I just want to know are we making the right decisions? Do we have the right people making those decisions? And so that's kind of the way I tackle it. So, yeah, I would say, starting at the top, I'm probably not going to I don't have any of these right now. At the top, I'm probably not going to um, I don't have any of these right now, and I probably would not say yes, um, to an organization that's trying to fix big problems and they're not including the most senior leaders in those conversations. Right, that would be that totally makes sense.
Speaker 2:Uh, wouldn't be very transformational for that organization.
Speaker 1:So I really want to work with an organization that has, uh, that.
Speaker 2:Tim, you still there. Yeah, we glitched out, didn't we? We glitched, but we're back, so that's good. Lucky it wasn't a full-on meltdown, but no, where it kind of cut out was like, you know the team at the top, like if they're not involved in the thing, then it doesn't make sense for you to even engage. They're the decision makers, they're the leaders, they're the people everyone's looking to, so that they're the leaders, they're the people everyone's looking to, so that, I mean, 100 makes sense. Um, how do you like, whether you're talking about culture or the health of the leadership team, how do you come in and assess that? What do you look for? Or or even maybe, after you've done work and you're like okay, now this team is healthy, like what does a healthy team look like?
Speaker 1:yeah, I mean a healthy team, I think has, uh, has built a huge amount of trust. Um, and that sounds like easy and it sounds like, oh, of course they need to trust each other. But, uh, trust so that and you know what you know they have trust when they can actually have, um, hold each other accountable, you know, can look at you and say you let the team down. Like you said, you're going to have that done by this week. You know, now we all have to wait Cause I mean, it's like those kinds of conversations where it's like I'm not coming at you, but like we're all in this together. So we have huge trust and there's, you know, things that you can do if the trust is lacking, to build trust.
Speaker 1:If the trust is lacking to build trust, sometimes it's, you know, you have someone who's untrustworthy in the room or you have someone who is insecure, and so it just kind of changes dynamics. You have to have healthy people in the room you got to build the trust. Another symptom would be the healthy conflict that we can actually wrestle solutions to the ground. The problem with a lot of organizations is like you get in a meeting. It's like didn't we talk about this already. I thought we already decided this.
Speaker 1:And it's because people don't commit to the decision. So people nod their head in the room, especially if the room's too large, if there's too many people in the room. People nod their head in assent but they didn't buy in because they didn't take the time to actually wrestle it to the ground. But they didn't buy in because they didn't take the time to actually wrestle it to the ground. They don't own that decision and so it's probably not going to work or not going to happen or not going to get implemented. And the people that nodded their head but don't agree, they're hoping it doesn't come back up again because they don't have any plan to commit to it.
Speaker 1:But if you've got trust, and then you have healthy conflict and then you actually commit to your decisions and a lot of that comes to systems of just making sure you know what you actually talked about and what decisions were made. So, having you know, I'll work with teams to not only have a good agenda but to have good note-taking and to have good questions that you put at the end of the meeting. Um, just to recap, okay, what did we decide today? You know who's going to do what. I went, who's carrying what out of here?
Speaker 1:Um and then uh, appropriate accountability and a lot of times that initially before you kind of have the trust of the team that's going to typically comes from the top. It's working best when it's coming from around the room, when we're keeping each other accountable for the things that we committed to, decisions that we made Right. And then the results. And then a healthy team is tracking the right things to see if they're accomplishing the things that they're after. In the church there's certain things, whether it's baptisms or whether it's group involvement or whether it's volunteer involvement or whether it's giving. There's things you're tracking to let you know if the decisions you're making are actually having an effect.
Speaker 2:so that would be, that's how I would look at kind of that trust at that leadership level, right, right how do people uh, develop that you know, like, like some trust I guess you get, because maybe you were like the church you joined when there were 200 people, small team, the three, four, five people that were there before. You were probably there from the beginning. Yeah, we started it together. So there's this kind of level of trust and level of accountability, level of buy-in, level of excitement, all the things that are like there because you started the thing Like you're, you know you, like, own it, it's yours. Well then you start hiring people there because you started the thing like you're, you know you, you like own it, it's yours.
Speaker 2:Well then you start hiring people. Maybe sometimes those hires are in the early days. They're like friends, people you already know, people you have some of that connectivity with. But at a certain stage you start hiring people, uh, that are like not in that circle, like they're like new people. Maybe you don't know, uh, maybe somebody else on the team doesn't know. Either they're like third ring or not. You went through a full-on, regular interview process to hire somebody you know. So how do you build, you know, when you get to a certain size, like really build that trust with, like the new folks or yeah, what, what? Any tips or insights or things you've seen work well in that situation?
Speaker 1:yeah, I mean I went through that at granger where you, you know, when I got there there was five of us and church was pretty small, and so when you're starting something, or you know, or you're very small, you know all that stuff's caught, you know, it's just, it's in the air you breathe, it's in the hallways. It's like everyone kind of signed on for those same exact values. Everyone trusts each other. The bigger you get, it has to be taught and systemized, it has to work itself into the DNA and that doesn't happen without a lot of intentionality. So some of that's codifying it. It's like codifying not just as an organization gets bigger. When you're small, you don't have an employee handbook and then it's like, oh wait, someone did something stupid.
Speaker 2:We better write a rule down. I've lived those days, I literally know exactly what that's like.
Speaker 1:And then when I got to Willow they were 43 years old.
Speaker 1:They had a large handbook because they had a lot of things. I'm for minimizing as much as possible. Some things that you codify aren't just the rules, but the values of the behaviors, um, the things that that matter for how we're going to treat each other, how we're going to behave, and what, what, what matters most to us, um, and then figuring out how do we systemize those. Um, so, uh, an example at uh will in fact, I'll grab my stress cube with our values on it but we had five different values, or staff values, and we went through this process because we were at a broken place. We had a lot of new people coming on. We had people been there over 40 years on staff. Wow, we had people you know dozens have been there over 40 years on staff.
Speaker 1:Wow, we'd have people you know, dozens have been there over 30 years on staff, and then we had, you know, by time, uh, within probably a year after I'd been there, we probably had uh 50 to 100 people that were brand new, like I was. And so, you know, and we're merging all these cultures old willow culture, new willow culture, all these places that we came from and so we just kind of said, you know, who are we going to be? This is like this is the new church, in essence, and uh, and we need to figure out who we're going to be. So what their process of of just um, assessing what are what is true about us, yeah, and then, um, you know, deciding together who do we want to be? And so we pulled together I think it was 14 or 15 people from across willow, a diverse group from different locations and different um diversity, different tenure, uh, men and women, old and young, and uh, and pick those people based on like these people actually embody a culture of who we think we want to be, and then, like, got them together and then let's say, let's dream about this, you know.
Speaker 1:And so we came up with five values, um, so, like, one of them is believe the best. Trust is our default, because, because of the uh problems we've gone through as an organization. Uh, we got to a place where we were believing the worst about everyone, because leaders had let us down, our friends had let us down, a lot of hurt and so we had to, like, aspirationally, say we want one of our values to be believe the best. Trust is our, is our default. Another one was is embrace, challenge, grid is our style. So there's five of them. But what we did is then we just like, took those values and like and then how do we get them into the air that we breathe and the water that we drink? And so that you do that through systems. So systems would be about every fourth staff meeting which we do once a week, so about once a month. We're going to take 15 or 20 minutes and we're going to focus on one of these five values in staff meeting.
Speaker 1:What that looked like is usually just tap someone on the shoulder among hundreds of staff that other people say, man, that person lives out that value, and so we'd say, hey, would you get up and talk about this value, because people think you live it up. We would have an every other week staff newsletter. So we'd have someone just pick up their iPhone and record a video and talk into it about what that value means to them. Video and talking to it about what that value means to them. We have an onboarding process where we would teach these values when someone's coming into the organization and then put them in a group for the first year. This was getting going just as I was leaving. Put them in a group for a whole year where they're actually able to learn and grapple with those values throughout that first year. Performance reviews you know, basing those on your values. Raises bonuses, basing those on how people live out your values. Exit interviews you know, having them give a reflection on the organization through the lens of those values. So lots of different ways.
Speaker 1:So the goal is it and it takes probably two or three years of a church being really intentional, a staff being really intentional, before it's like, okay, this is actually, this is. This has a life of its own right.
Speaker 2:It's actually, you know, from the ground up, not just from the top down yeah, you're like this is who we wanted to be and we maybe we were some of those things or we were all of them in some way, but like four years later, you're like no, this is who we are, like we are doing things, this is what you know goes on around here. Yeah, especially in an organization that size, like that sounds like you know it's a big ship. Uh, creating change takes a lot of time and intentionality, absolutely.
Speaker 1:And I think I'm working with an organization or church right now in Canada that has about 15 staff and I think it doesn't matter the size of the staff. The codify that, write some of that down and make sure that it just continues for future generations of team there. Right, right.
Speaker 2:What about on the flip side? How would a senior leader spot poor culture or an unhealthy like leadership team dynamic? What are some of the signs that someone would start to see so they can kind of catch them early?
Speaker 1:I'm a big believer in surveys and there's a bunch of good culture surveys out there. I really don't think it matters. I mean, there are some bad ones too, but I don't think it matters so much which one you use. I think it's like good, use the same one, like once a year or something, okay that's a great way.
Speaker 1:It's not it's not the only way, but that's a great way to kind of just, you know, take the temperature of the culture in and you know if you use the the right tool in an anonymous way where people feel like they couldn't, yes and so, uh, I mean a couple couple that I like Vanderbilt, has one called the Culture Tool which I was able to help put together when I was working there. There's an expensive one, but a good one is the Gallup Q12 survey that we used at Willow a couple times. If anyone uses leader software, they have a tool built into the software. That's a fantastic uh uh, develop leadership development software. They have uh, uh built in there, um, taking a pulse on the culture. It's actually every month, so something like that, some kind of a assessment tool, is a good thing to have. Um, and then I think you know information flows downhill. So, and then I think information flows downhill, so leaders are usually the last to hear.
Speaker 1:I remember when I was leading at Granger, the children's pastor reported up to me and she had 13 on her staff. Most of them were part-time. I think she maybe had two or three full-time and the rest were like 10 hours a week, kind of thing. But, um, and she was, she led up well. So we come into one-on-ones, man, I thought everything was fantastic. And then I start hearing things and I'm like what's going on? And I asked her about it and she's like everything's great. And then I hear, you know, from sideways it's like man, you got to figure that out Something's going on over there and I I mean, she'd been with us at that point, maybe eight or nine years and um, but some toxicity was starting to bubble up there and I wasn't seeing it Cause I don't, I don't go to her meetings, I don't, you know, I'm not in all those classrooms, so I wasn't seeing it and I wasn't hearing it. And I think people generally, most people, are going to like they don't want to complain, they don't want to look like they're going around their boss to tell on their boss, you know so. But ultimately the thing just kind of exploded and she quit and then we had to deal with this and once she left and I started getting engaged, it's like, oh, my word, the toxicity that it was. Actually she was not only letting happen, but initiating in some ways. And so that's when and that was boy, probably 15, maybe 20 years ago. Um, that's since then.
Speaker 1:It's like trying to figure out, like, how do I, how do I listen to the people that are below the person who's below the person who's below me? Um, and doing that in a few different ways. So I'll give you some examples. Um, that we did at Willow One is we do these surveys once a year surveys and then I would rotate around and maybe one of the other executive pastors rotate around to every different group, and there was, I think, the last time we did. There's maybe 26 different teams of five to 15 people and we would rotate around to each of those teams and just say, hey, you took the survey. That's great. Here's some things we want to ask you about. This came out from your team. Tell us more about that. We really want to hear, we really want to get this right, to get them to the next time.
Speaker 1:The second, third, fourth time to like be super open was we just went to the whole staff after that cycle and just said, hey, here's what we heard, here's where we're missed as leaders of the church, here's where we're missing it and we get you know, we're missing it here, here and here, and here's exactly what we're going to do to address this, because you're, you're right, you know we suck at communication. I think was one of them. Uh, we haven't been very. Um, uh, there was once one, one of the surveys.
Speaker 1:It was like it feels like, you know, the leaders are kind of in an ivory tower and there's the rest of staff, so it's like we got to break down those walls. Here's the three or four things we're gonna do. So like actually circling back so they feel like, oh man, they heard right and they're doing something about it. Um, then they're going to be open to talk the next time and you're going to be able to hear more of that as a leader. You just have to want to hear it. I've worked for people who don't want to hear it. I'm in the number two chair and the person in the number one chair is like you can take a survey if you want. I do not want to see the results. I mean, you can only go so far when you're dealing with that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, the surveys we do, um, it's called like have you ever heard of nps like net promoter score? Yeah, it's like. It's definitely a thing in the software world. I'm not sure if it applies in other industries, but, um, there's also a thing called e-nps, so it's like employee nps. Yeah, we do that.
Speaker 2:Uh, I think we do it twice a year and, uh, we, we started that a couple years ago and I totally like understand what you're saying because we started doing it and the feedback you get from that survey.
Speaker 2:It's anonymous and then we bucket things kind of like themes, so I put the books together based on it and, uh, it's been really good and but you need somebody who, uh, is like very passionate about that kind of work and good at doing it on the team.
Speaker 2:You know what I'm saying because, yeah, I wouldn't naturally do that right as a leader. That's not my. I want to hear from people, but I'm not necessarily going to be like, oh, let me go do this survey thing and then bring it all together, but having a person who's passionate about it and runs it well has been awesome. It's been super valuable for the whole organization and then they help do what you're describing, where you got those themes and you're like, okay, in the next all hands, we do our all hands, quarterly, the whole company. But it's like we're gonna kind of read out what we heard and what the common themes were and then try to tie different things we do throughout the year to like, oh, we're responding this, it was this thing from the feedback, it's why we did x? Um, you know, you try to communicate it. Yeah, you know, I don't know if we're good at it yet, but it's why, we
Speaker 1:did x um, you know you try to communicate it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, I don't know if we're good at it yet, but it's definitely been a useful tool to try to help.
Speaker 1:You know yep, that intel and then take action on it I I do think you need like every organization needs someone who wakes up every day thinking about the health of the team and the culture and it doesn't have to be their only job, and most, most organizations is not going be.
Speaker 1:It's like you can't pay someone just to do that, but it should be a piece of their job because it takes tenacity to do the surveys, to actually follow up. It takes someone Because churches are busy and there's a plan in the next week and a lot of times senior pastors it's not the first thing on their mind, so they're going to continue to kind of move on to what's next but someone who has that gift of tenacity that can really make sure we're actually going to do something about this. One of the things that when they said we suck at communication, they were right. So it's like, okay, how do we fix that? So we dug in a little bit to exactly you know where is the communication lacking. So one of it was that kind of like distance between the leadership team and, uh, the staff. So we just started every, I think once a month. We started doing just open q a, bring your own lunch and ask anything you want and the leadership team will be there and ask anything you want.
Speaker 1:And the first few times we had to kind of like, uh, have a couple of plants to ask some really awkward questions, cause we wanted them to get used to the fact that it's okay. So, like it's okay to ask what? But seriously, ask whatever you want. We're not going to let you know if you say why'd so-and-so get fired. We may not be able to tell you an HR thing yeah, of course, but we'll answer everything we can. Another thing was you know they're like these leadership team meetings happen. We just never know what's decided. The information is not getting cascaded very well. So we started having someone sit in with us and just take high-level notes and we published those for the whole organization at the end of that day and just said this is what the leadership team these are the topics they talked about in any major decisions that you couldn't put every single thing in there, but you could put 90% of what we talked about in there. Yeah, yeah, there's big help. Big help, for the people felt like, okay, you're being more transparent.
Speaker 2:So did you bring someone into the meeting that was already? Was it somebody on the leadership team, like hey, you're responsible for, like, note-taking and organizing whatever. Or did you bring in, like you know, an executive assistant or somebody like that? That was like you're in these meetings now because I need you to just be our documenter of yeah that was it.
Speaker 1:It was an executive assistant who we just had super trust in her confidentiality and um. She was a steel trap and, just you know, was really super helpful for us yeah, that's a great idea.
Speaker 2:I love that. Um, man, before you said that I was thinking about something and it like just slipped my mind, uh, but happens to me all the time yeah, you said another cool thing and I was like, oh, that's a great idea. I'm gonna start like, I'm gonna Like, um, have someone come in and kind of uh, was it the Q?
Speaker 1:and a, the Q and a or the, having someone wake up every day thinking about the Q and a did you guys do?
Speaker 2:was that like a quarterly session where you would do the open Q and a? It was a monthly? Oh, you did it every month. And was it a portion of the meeting where you're like, okay, 20 minutes of the meeting is?
Speaker 1:open Q&A. No, it was a standalone meeting. It was a lunchtime, it was bring your own lunch, totally optional. So at the time we were probably having like 60 to 70 people out of maybe 250 that would show up for that and so, and we would also take notes on that and publish those notes for people that wanted to be there and couldn't. But sometimes we would have like, the first 10 minutes would be some kind of information. So we might say, hey, first 10 minutes we're going to give you an overview of next year's budget that we just landed Right. Or the first 10 minutes we're going to talk, you know, difficult situation happening at such and such campus or whatever. But then it's open Q&A about anything you want to ask about.
Speaker 2:Right, right, yeah, and I love those ideas and I could keep going all day long. Why don't you tell us a little bit about Leading Smart and like how folks you know? You kind of gave us the overview, but now that you're in it, you've been kind of doing it full time for a year how do people find out about you guys and kind of engage with you on various leadership and team topics?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so pretty easy. So leadingsmartcom you can go there. There's a button probably on just about every page that says let's talk, and if they click that they can get 15 or 20 minutes on my calendar and we can talk and see if our team could be a fit for them and kind of tool through the website to see kind of the different things that we're involved in. I write an article just about every Tuesday and put it out in a newsletter so they can sign up for that if they're interested in that. It's not a sales piece, it's just a thought leadership piece. Yeah, Um, so yeah, I'd love to. You know if someone's interested in the conversation. Um, love to have that conversation.
Speaker 2:Do you do most of your work in person or do you also do things kind of virtually in today's age?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a little bit. It's a bit of both, but I've got like right now I've got six churches that I'm with every month or every other site, or maybe a day and a half, just to really get to know that person and their team and kind of get their context, and then it'll be virtual monthly calls after that. So a little bit of both, yeah, very cool.
Speaker 2:Um, last thing I know you're coming to speak at the modern church leader conference. Uh, any any teaser on what you plan on talking about?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I'm going to dive into this culture stuff and it's going to be about a third kind of telling the story. I'm going to just tell the story of Willow Creek and kind of what we walked in there on the staff level, yeah, and then kind of real tangible what we did to actually turn things around there and I say we because it wasn't me, it was a team that pulled together to do that and then we'll have open Q&A around it just to make sure it's really applicable for people and their organizations and their teams and I would say, for folks coming. Don't think it's like oh, that doesn't apply to me, because I don't lead a church with 300 staff. Like, if you lead like an IT team and you have, you know, three volunteers on your staff, on your team, it still applies. It's like culture matters, no matter what size the team is and whether people are paid or unpaid.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I love that. What's the biggest takeaway around culture that you could have someone remember, right, if they watch the podcast or come to your session like something that everybody can just like take away and go like okay, I'm going to stick with this one.
Speaker 1:I would say culture is never static. It doesn't stay the same. It's either getting better or it's getting worse, and if you're not intentional it's absolutely getting worse. The only way to keep it getting better is to be super intentional about it, yeah.
Speaker 2:I love that being intentional about culture is also like super squishy, right. So I love how you've given some practical examples and things that kind of help people grab on to it. So, man, I appreciate the time. Like I said, I could keep going, but uh, want to be respectful. Thanks for jumping on the show today.
Speaker 1:Absolutely Looking forward to being there in October. The dates again are 16th.
Speaker 2:October, middle of October, I don't have a memory.
Speaker 1:I got to go to the website but that's a great venue where you're you're holding it. I was just there a couple weeks ago.
Speaker 2:Um, it's a super great venue, so I'm excited to be there it's a cool spot, easy to get in and out of um, we have lots of customers and there's obviously lots of churches all around there. So, uh, we're excited. It's our first big event. So we've done lots of regional things and little things and all that. But this year we were like, well, last year when we decided we were like let's try to put on a bigger event and see if we can, um, get some great speakers like yourself and bring together a community of churches that, uh, either use Tidely products or don't, but kind of bring that community together Um, just cause we, you know, we serve almost 40,000 churches around the world. So if we can get a bunch of users together to fellowship and also get some great content and learn some other things too, it'd be be a phenomenal show. So we're doing our best.
Speaker 2:We'll see how it goes. Yep, that's awesome, looking forward to it. Oh, good times. Tim, thanks for coming on the show. Guys, thanks for listening in today. Give the show a like, give it a comment. We're always reading all those and we will see you next week on another episode of Modern Church Leader. Bye-bye.