How to really change a church? - with Archie Poulos and Kirsty Bucknell

Tinkering or transformation?

How do you change a church, like really change, not just tweak a program or update a roster, but challenge the whole model? 

Kodak missed the shift to digital photography. We’ve seen huge changes in industries impacting newspapers, landline telephones, taxis, bank branches, travel agents, street directories, encyclopedias. For each the world moved on.

But have churches missed a revolution too, and if so, what is it?

Archie Poulos from Moore College’s Centre for Ministry Development says we’ve been tinkering around the edges, changing tactics without changing the operating model, especially when our structures were built for a village world while many relationships today are affinity based. 

Kirsty Bucknell outlines a change framework to help us bring people with us. 

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Transcript

Why Churches Miss Big Shifts

SPEAKER_05 0:08

How do you change a church? Like really change, like challenge the whole model. It is the pastor's heart. It's Dominic Steele and Archie Poulos and Kirsty Bucknell are our guests. Kodak missed the shift to digital photography. Film worked in the past and yet now everything is digital. Blockbuster missed the shift to streaming. People don't come to the store for content. They expect the content to meet them where they are. We don't buy newspapers. The distribution has all changed. Landlines to smartphones, bank branches to apps, taxis to ride shares, travel agents to self-booking, office-only to hybrid and remote, Encyclopedia Britannica to Wikipedia, and street directories to Google Maps. But what about churches? Have we missed the revolution? And what revolution do we need? Archie Poulos is frustrated that we're not challenging ourselves enough on whether or not what we're doing still fits the world we're trying to reach. Archie is director of the Center for Ministry Development at Sydney's Moore Theological College, and Kirsty Bucknell is an organizational psychologist who's part of the team there. Archie says we're tinkering around the edges, but big change is needed. We change tactics without changing the operational model. Well, Archie, what is your pastor's heart for the churches around as you look at us? What's the shift we're missing or resisting?

SPEAKER_01 1:39

Yeah, thank you, Dominique. Uh, there's a whole lot of answers to that. I think what we often do is focus our attention on what's going on in the congregation and going on in the parish. And so we tweak and tinker with that, but we often don't think more widely than that. So two of the things I'd want to pick up today about change, but there'll be many more of them. One is a structural change, that is, how does our church relate to other churches?

From Village Life To Modern Mobility

SPEAKER_01 2:05

And the second one is the changing nature of relationships in our world. Can I speak a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_04 2:11

Yeah, maybe we do the second one before the first one. Yeah, okay. So changing nature.

SPEAKER_01 2:15

Yeah, well, if uh our churches are still functioning the way they have historically for 500 years and maybe even closer to a thousand years, and that is villages. So, you know, I'm in the English-speaking world. So London in the 1500s and 1600s was a whole lot of villages, even though it was a city, it was a whole lot of villages. And at the centre of the village was the square, and right at the centre of the square was the church. And so relationships were geographically based because you didn't go to other villages, and everything happened around the village. I notice here, even in your uh church here, I know people don't, not everyone comes to your church, but as I walked in, the councillors put the names of all the different types of activities there.

SPEAKER_05 2:57

Yeah, blacksmith and I mean they've they've listed all the different professions that were big in the village, um, and they've put it onto the pavement. And if you're watching on the YouTube, we'll put a little video of this up, but it's blacksmith and uh all those kind of professions.

SPEAKER_01 3:15

Trevor Burrus, Jr. And I think it's quite telling that they've done it outside of your church building because the church was the centre. And so relationships were through the church. You didn't have to do anything. You uh And you didn't need anywhere for morning tea because you had relationships all week. Yeah, and it was the same in Australia at least, I don't know about the rest of the world, up until the 1950s. So you still had the corner shop. You talked about changes. You don't have the corner shop anymore, you have the mall and the supermarket. Uh people went on their sporting activities in their local town, in their local village. And that's all changed now, and yet we still run things in a village type way. Some aspects are, I'll talk about this in a moment, some aspects are still village, uh, but not many are, because people get in their car and they travel. And so geography doesn't define our identity anymore. No one is known as the village in which they live. They're known by the job that they do or where their kids go to school, those sorts of things. And so relationships matter, but we still, I think, haven't come to grips with the fact that the way that church does relationships is different to the way that society does relationships. People are much more mobile. 20% of my city is going to move in the next five years. And so you're not anchored in your village anymore. So we need to think about that. So our churches, rather than doing things for their geography, need to also think about what affinity group am I going to try and reach? So, for example, my church.

SPEAKER_05 4:47

Oh, sorry, you've got a question I'm raving here. I just was I was I'm in this on this regional council for our local area for the for the denomination. And um, we had to have a decision the other day at this council meeting on parish boundaries and whether or not the the parish boundary between X church would be um two blocks this way or two blocks that way. And I just thought, this is absurd.

SPEAKER_01 5:11

Yeah, it is. That's what I mean about it's good you need to focus internally to make sure the thing works well, but what that so often does is make us blind to the other things. And so if we relate by affinities and not by geography anymore, it opens up all sorts of gospel opportunities for us. So in our local parish, we have Jesus Club, which I've spoken about here before.

SPEAKER_05 5:34

Well, what is Jesus Club?

SPEAKER_01 5:35

Jesus Club is uh is a club for adults with disability because they don't easily fit into a whole lot of our other structures.

SPEAKER_05 5:42

And and you you're particularly interested in this because of your son.

SPEAKER_01 5:45

Yeah, I have a son with a disability. Yeah. And so uh one of the things you can't do a Jesus club in every parish. It's actually energy and resource intensive. But if we think affinities, maybe in your region, for example, you can have one Jesus club that all of the churches support, and then that that uh that can work together to reach that affinity group. And then there's another group that we so seldom reach well, and that is divorcees. Well, why would you you you may not want to do a divorcee

Affinity Groups And New Mission Openings

SPEAKER_01 6:15

ministry in every parish, but why not have one or two parishes in a region where you do a divorcee ministry? So what you can do is rather than try every church thinking it needs to create the suite of everything and cater for everyone, why don't we work as a team and then you could each church can actually pick the affinity group that it is uh best able to try and reach and then work for that, and then what you're doing is covering up.

SPEAKER_05 6:43

I support the other ones. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:45

And so you're what you're doing is able to reach more people because our identity is chosen and it's tied up not by our geography but by other things. So let's try and find out what the other things are, and each of the different parishes could be reaching those types of people.

SPEAKER_05 7:01

Now, at one level, what you're suggesting doesn't sound that controversial. I mean, I'm just thinking um uh our church, uh there's an there's another church over at Surrey Hills, they have uh a ministry to homeless people at breakfast time on Sundays, and we group crook a group from here go over and cook the barbecue breakfast. One Sunday a month. Now, the we're already doing that, you know, but you're wanting to push us much more down that line.

SPEAKER_01 7:29

Yeah, I think that the default position of most of our churches is that we think we need to do everything in our place. So we need to do children's ministry, we need to do youth ministry, we need to do whatever we need to do seniors ministry, every parish needs to do that. That's a lot of resources uh that might be better used elsewhere. And so, for example, in you know, my my denomination, there are people who like uh standard liturgy, you know, using a book and all that sort of stuff. So lots of churches saying, Oh, well, we need every church needs to do that, and they do it in a sometimes poor way. Maybe we could have one or two churches that do that well. Bring people, and oh, it's often elderly, but bring them in a bus to this place and give them a really good experience of that sort of thing. Uh that's but that actually involves generosity, it involves needing to trust other people. The way we tend to function, although we don't own up to it, is that I run my church and I do everything in my church, so I don't have no leakage of my people, and the church next door is my competitor. What you do with the church in Surrey Hills is that you generously give your people to this ministry as well because you see its value. That is a it's it seems uh as though it's non-contentious, but why aren't we doing it more? Where would you like us to do it more? I think uh there's there's a few things, which leads on to my second point about structural changes. Uh, we have grown up again with this village model where the uh local church was self-contained and it did everything itself. I want us to explore how we might work with the other churches because the church down the road has the same goal as my church does. That is to see people built up and more people come to know Jesus so that God might be glorified. And so, why aren't we working more together in that in that sort of thing? And so what I'd like us to do is actually explore some of our structures. If I can tell you about some failures we had, would that be a helpful thing? Um, and again, I'm sure other denominations have done it as well. Uh, I proposed a model a few years ago which I picked up from the secular world, which was Hub and Spoke, that is, have a centralized. I love the idea, but the title is so terrible. And I'll tell you why else it failed as well. Um the title is terrible,

Sharing Ministry Without Losing People

SPEAKER_01 9:55

but it gets the idea of a of a wheel, though, that there is something central and there are other groups around the edge that all share the resources. Um uh the title did alienate people, but there are other things because I want to be the hub, I don't want to be the spirit. Yeah, exactly. That that's that's the sort of thing. So I I I I introduced it as I was thinking about children and youth ministry because I said before we no longer function in villages. One place where we function in villages is when we've got little children. Yeah. Because little children aren't portable.

SPEAKER_05 10:25

And so my observation of young parents is well, well, actually, my observation of people is they graduate from nursing and their friends are nurses, you know, or

Working Together Through New Structures

SPEAKER_05 10:35

they graduate from communications and they've got a whole lot of media friends, or they th those kind of things. And so we actually move into at one level the professional tribe, you know. Um, but when we have a baby, we move into the mum's group tribe, you know.

SPEAKER_01 10:51

Yeah, yeah. My wife is still friends of a lady she met in the mum's group when our first child was 12 months old, uh, because you're anchored when you've got children.

SPEAKER_05 11:00

So And when you've got the primary school kids, you're part of that primary school. Now, at one level, that does allow us to continue to do village ministry in the primary school demographic.

SPEAKER_01 11:12

That's what I want to say. Village still exists when you're when you're anchored. And so children give you an anchoredness. And what what churches have done around the world, I've noticed, is for financial necessity reasons, they've amalgamated churches, which just means you consolidate in one place so you have a hub and no spokes. I think to do kids' ministry, we need to keep our churches open because people are still anchored and older people are still anchored. There's there's people who are still anchored in their geography, but some things need to be a hub as well. So I think youth ministry, young people want to swarm together.

SPEAKER_05 11:45

And so I'm just thinking there. When we had kids at primary school, I mean, it was for us it was before WhatsApp groups, but all sorts of people have got super busy WhatsApp groups of the primary school class community, whereas nobody has that as parents for the high school kids. You know, we we didn't meet really hardly any of the high school parents, whereas we knew lots of the primary school parents.

SPEAKER_01 12:12

Yeah, yeah. So I think that I want to have our cake and eat it too. I want to keep our local churches open rather than consolidating closing down and selling off because there are reasons where anchored people need to have a local church, but we also can do something bigger and better than we can do individually. Now, the reason that Hub and Spoke failed, there's lots of reasons. One is the name, as you've suggested.

SPEAKER_05 12:35

Uh another one I mean, do you think though, I mean, the ch the multi-site church suggestion? I mean, Hub and Spoke's slightly different to multi-site, but the multi-site church people, um Wade Burnett and those kind of people, are suggesting 20 minutes apart is the ideal distance for a second congregation if you're run by the same leadership team. Whereas it felt to me like the the Hub and Spoke connection was churches next door.

SPEAKER_01 13:01

Yeah, near or nearby. I think it's got to be reasonably nearby. And I I think that data about the 20 minutes is probably right. I haven't tested it in Australia, but I I think it's it feels right to me. But Hub and Spoke failed for another reason as well, and or a couple of other reasons. Uh I we tried four of them. Uh one of them involved four churches that were proximate to each other, and they'd worked out if they worked together because of compliance demands, which are right things like uh child protection and all that sort of stuff, if they worked together, they could release four days of a pastor's time each week.

SPEAKER_05 13:41

So in these So each church, one I mean you've got four churches working together. Each you're you're saying each senior minister was sending spending a day a week or three-quarters of a day a week on compliance stuff.

SPEAKER_01 13:54

And you could do it in one quarter the time if you're together. So that gives you almost another clergy person, another pastor, just by working together.

SPEAKER_05 14:03

It failed for we reduce the amount of compliance.

SPEAKER_01 14:07

Well, I well, I I'm not going there.

SPEAKER_05 14:11

It just drives me mad. My heart sinks every time I get

Why Hub And Spoke Stalled

SPEAKER_05 14:15

an email that has the denominational um uh the back part of it. Um I think anyway, you know what I've done? I've set them all to be forwarded to my administrator. So but I don't know how people without an administrator survive in this game.

SPEAKER_01 14:31

But there's other things too. It's not just compliance, it's things like maintenance. Uh that takes a huge amount of time, which often distracts people from the ministry that they should be doing. And so if we were to, you know, anyway. Um uh Hubb and Spoke also failed because there was an argument about who would lead it. Who cares in the end? Um, it failed because people were thinking that I was advocating this as the alternative to what we currently have. And I just want to say, let's explore it. It's not one size fits all, it's not moving from the parish model to the hub and spoke model. It's thinking about what is the best way that we can work together. So you need to have people who will trust each other, you need to have an eldership, deacons, parish council, whatever denomination you're in, who are willing to give up an element of their control. That that's a really that that caused stumbling sometimes. You need to be reasonably aligned, you need to be reasonably aligned theologically, but you don't have to be absolutely aligned because this actually enables different ministries to have slightly different complexions. And I think what drives us and what should drive us is the gospel opportunity in it. God has given our us great resources in the buildings, the properties that we own, and the people who we have. And it's all our responsibilities from the senior minister down to the congregation member to steward those resources as well as we can. And so often we have these blindness about the structural things and blindness about relationships. So that's why I'm a bit uh exercised over the whole thing.

SPEAKER_05 16:08

Um you've also talked about um I'm just thinking about other reasons why change might fail. Um you've talked about loss of control from and at that point you're both talking the minister and the parish council fearing loss of control. Who's in charge? There's a couple of others though. There's historical memory and glory days.

SPEAKER_01 16:32

Yes, yes. I um I this is just research I've done in Sydney, Australia, my environment. So those that are watching elsewhere will need to do their own work. Um but everywhere looks back to the glory days. Yeah, yeah. So in the 1950s in Australia, churches were full after the Second World War, and youth and kids' ministries were so big. And so everybody looks back to those days and says we just need to recover those. And the way we recover them is by doing what we're doing now better. So historical success means I don't want to change. That's one of the things that uh that takes place. And the and another thing, which is just an extension of that, is we can still pay our bills. We are still in our the way we do church, we're still relatively successful, and so the pain and the necessity of thinking of change isn't as crucial for us because we can just keep going

Glory Days And The Fear Of Change

SPEAKER_01 17:25

as we have always gone.

SPEAKER_05 17:26

Aaron Powell I mean, here in Sydney we we saw, and we've talked about this before on the Pastor's Heart and the whole synods had discussions, but we'd seen a 7% attendance drop over a decade. And actually at that point, the pain of not changing is starting to become real. Do you know? And uh one of the things I fear is that with a slight recovery back, we think, oh, okay, we don't need to think about changing.

SPEAKER_01 17:51

Yeah, I think uh Chris will talk about this in a moment, but I I think that's absolutely right. That uh uh one what we did though, because we had this decline and some churches became unviable, we only had the one solution, which was to amalgamate parishes. And therefore you lose that footprint, you lose that that opportunity we have as a village, and also you don't optimize that central advantage that we can have. And so I just want to say before we get to that point and have the necessity of amalgamation, let's think of working with how do we work with each other and not be afraid of it. Let's challenge some of the structures that we have and be prepared to modify them, and let's think about the changing nature of relationships from geography to affinity.

SPEAKER_05 18:36

Okay. Kirsty Bucknell, you've been sitting quietly and we brought you in because we wanted, I mean, Archie having dropped the bombs of changes are needed. Uh, we we want to ask you, well, okay, if I've got a needed change, how do I do that change? But just before we ask about how do I do that change, um you've obviously been sitting there reflecting on what Archie's just said, kind of let's hear your thoughts.

SPEAKER_00 19:00

Yeah, sure. As I as I think about these sorts of things, I think about the the great need for mission or work. It's so exciting to hear about it. Uh and yet when we're thinking about change, uh change is the external thing. Most often when we when the reasons for change failing is because it's the actual transitions that's going on inside us, our psychological state, whether or not we actually want to go through this change, whether we're holding on to the past that prevents us from making the change. So uh while we

Change Fails In The Human Heart

SPEAKER_00 19:40

think about these great exciting things that we might be able to do for the gospel to reach more people, to encourage more people, uh, we also need to think about what's held us back and why haven't the changes worked quite so well? And can we do those changes better?

SPEAKER_05 19:59

Okay. So um how I mean, let's try and role play a change that needs to happen, and then you can bring a structure of um how to do it on top. What's a what's a change that we could role play, Archie, that you think I mean, well let's say we want to change our focus as a church from village to affinity, you know? Um I mean I'll I'll give you an example. I've just taken over the uh leadership of a church um 20 minutes west of here, so leading both, and um I we had a meeting, a couple of meetings in December, and I said, Really this church right now this is Concord, and um this church right now has an average demographic uh of retirees, and if you look north, the average age is retirees, but if you look south, the average age is forty-three in Concord. And for this church to have a real future, we need to pursue an average age of 43-year-olds. We've got to pursue parents, you know.

SPEAKER_01 21:14

I I think that's I was gonna suggest exactly that thing, and so Kirsty can speak to it. But one of I I think the question is most of our churches start ministries or in continue to engage in ministries as they've always done. And one of the changed things is you're gonna have to kill one of them. In order to do new things and to retarget the 43-year-olds, you you're going to have to stop doing something else. And that is that is the hardest thing to do. So I thought Kirsty might want to speak into that.

SPEAKER_00 21:44

Well, the model that we tend to use when we're thinking about change management, uh, by and large, is what the one that I've used is ADCAR, um, which Now ADCAR sounds like an acronym.

SPEAKER_05 21:55

We're an anti-acronym program. Oh, I'm so sorry.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

And here I am bringing acronyms. So it stands for so it's spelling out A D K A R. So A is for awareness, D is for desire, K is for knowledge, A is for ability, and R is for reinforcement.

SPEAKER_05 22:17

Okay, I've got those words. Now give it to me in sentence.

SPEAKER_00 22:20

Yeah, exactly. So awareness is really uh setting up a conversation around why do we need to change? Um what's what's going on in this place in our in our space, in our affinity groups, in our parish or the local area. Um what what are the dynamics that we're seeing? Why why might we really need to change? If we're looking at the attendance numbers, we might need to change. And so this awareness is uh sometimes talked about the burning platform, but it's not always a burning platform. It might just be thinking about things differently, being challenged to think differently. Uh, it might be missional, it might be thinking, actually, there's a real need for us to do something different. Um and so that's that's the awareness piece, but we want to bring people with us on that awareness piece. Uh if if uh just the ministry team or just the eldership or the parish council are the ones that are making the decisions on this, then uh it makes life harder. And so we really we want to move people from awareness into the next stage, which is desire. And so this moves us from not just being alert to the issue, but wanting to make a change.

SPEAKER_05 23:47

Okay. If the principle is awareness, what should I do in my situation, Dr. Archie?

SPEAKER_01 23:52

Well, I think you've done it. You've actually looked at the demographic issues, and so you've made people aware. And the desire is really a gospel thing, isn't it? That there are so many souls here that don't know Jesus. Isn't that enough motivation? But it we'd say it's enough, but we've got to keep reinforcing it. So, you know, over to Kirsty on desire, I suppose.

SPEAKER_00 24:14

Yeah, yeah. So it's really just thinking through how do we get people on board with making this change

Awareness Does Not Create Desire

SPEAKER_00 24:20

across our, you know, across the different hubs and spokes, across the different elements of the church, churches involved. So thinking through bringing people on board, lots of communication, lots of opportunity for conversation and discussion, for questions, to have the reasons why they might resist uncovered and explored. Because the first time you come up with a solution, it may not always be the right one. And the more we have people talking about it, discussing it, bringing their different perspectives, it draws them into this change and helps move them in into a transition, helps them move from just coming up with the idea to wanting to be part of it.

SPEAKER_05 25:06

So you're really putting under the heading of desire, um building a coalition of willing. Well, it's really getting everyone to desire the change and then engaging in the conversation on what the change should be. Costly buy-in.

SPEAKER_03 25:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 25:22

Costly buy-in. I like that term. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:24

Yeah.

unknown 25:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 25:25

I mean, and at this point, I mean, it's still early, it's very early days for me at Concord. I think they they definitely see that I I think there was a very there was a there was a clear penny drop moment in the room. Wow, I hadn't actually looked at the census figures for Concord. I called this person Concord Christine, do you know that we want to actually design church for? Now, I think people have said, yes, we want to do that, but haven't actually thought about, well, what are going to be the costs of that yet? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:58

And so in this stage, it's moving people from not just thinking about the change, but transitioning in internally for me, what's going on for me, can I buy into it, recognizing that as part of this, I'm going there are going to be some losses. I'm I there will be some griefs in letting go of the past that we want to acknowledge. But as part of a part of acknowledging some of the losses, we can also see the great benefits that will come with the change. And there are reasons for why we would make the change. And in this instance, mission will change.

SPEAKER_05 26:33

So, Archie, as you've talked with people and you've thought, ah, they're fitting under this knowledge thing of losses and benefits. Where have some of those conversations and observations pointed you at to?

SPEAKER_01 26:45

Um, sometimes, I sorry, Kirsty's much more granular than I am, so she's dealing with it much more than I am. But when we've got to uh the desire part, uh people have expressed the desire, but have used a theological argument that says we've got to be the church for everyone, for example, or we we we've got another person who's just like me who'll be really offended by any sorts of changes. And so we mustn't do that because we must care for them. And so what we we've got to be really careful of justifying a non-change because of the pain of my transition and justifying it theologically. I hear that regularly, so we've got to be very careful of that. But giving people an understanding that sure it will be painful, but the desire to see Christ glorified is greater than that, which means that onto the knowledge, I think.

SPEAKER_05 27:45

Well, knowledge, Kirsty.

SPEAKER_00 27:47

Yeah, so knowledge is uh it's more focused on the structural change, like how to make the external change, knowing how to go about doing it. If we've decided that we're going to go ahead with some kind of a new arrangement, then how are we gonna do that? And we all want to do that. How are we gonna make it happen? So this is the knowledge of how to make the change work. So this can be actually establishing the structural components, like um laying out new new organization structures, things like new job roles, new um way uh new ways of working and defining those things for people so that we're actually really clear on what's involved.

unknown 28:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 28:35

It's interesting. I had a conversation with uh one of my team members about kind of doing that this week. And uh I said to her, uh,

From Plans To Ability And Reinforcement

SPEAKER_05 28:45

you re you'll probably do better if you get a third voice to be part of the conversation and you you don't want to be the one who's saying everything. You wanna and so I said, Why don't you share this pod or a particular podcast episode with all the team, and then that guy can paint the desired future, and then you can say, Now, which bits do we like and which bits do we not like? And if you get three-quarters of what he's painting, well, that'll be a whim. Um ability.

SPEAKER_00 29:21

Yes, ability is actually once we've started to make the change, it's becoming um effective. So we're now able to do the change, whatever the change is. So if we're creating a new way of working together, if we're trying to bring Concord Christine in, is that the right way? Christine from Concord, um, then um how how are we actually enabling that to happen? Are we practiced? So this is uh not just defining or knowing how to change, but it's actually starting to do the change and to do it well. So it involves lots of um coaching and practice. It might mean not just like setting out job descriptions, but helping people with engaging and do to do that better and better.

SPEAKER_05 30:13

And then finally reinforcement.

SPEAKER_00 30:15

Yeah. Uh so once we start to see some wins, celebrating that and recognizing where things are going well, tracking those things and encouraging people in that uh more and more.

SPEAKER_05 30:28

Now, Archie, uh, a rector coming to a new church, that's often the time when change um is discussed.

SPEAKER_01 30:35

Yeah, I I think it's too late at that point. Uh, that's what I've noticed in a few of the changes I've sought to try and help churches with is that the new minister coming into a church gets uh uh gets interviewed by people. And I've noticed that the inter those that are interviewing want to see change, want to see the church grow. They've got a gospel heart. And so what they want the new rector to do, the new minister to do, is do what they've always done, just do it better. And so take all the bad bits out of the previous person and just uh enact it better. And the problem is the new minister comes in and uh I have a conversation with them and say, how about we start to make look at these changes? How about we try and work with the churches nearby and uh and recognize the demographic changes?

Hiring A New Rector And Real Change

SPEAKER_01 31:20

And they say, I can't do that because I was brought in on the basis of continuing what we used to do, just doing it better. So I think we actually need to work with those that are interviewing for the new minister and say, all bets are off. Let's start to think about what is best for the gospel. What what appetite do you have for change? What willingness do you have to lose something for the gospel's sake? So that's what so I I've realized that I've been too late. So we've had some new ministers who have sought to bring about change, but felt like it would be treacherous and wrong to come in and bring about change when those that uh recruited them want just steady as she goes.

SPEAKER_02 32:03

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_05 32:04

And and potentially it is the case that um, I mean, in our denomination, it almost um I mean, we don't pick nominators, we often pick nominators in terms of guard the gospel rather than grow the gospel. Grow the gospel. Yeah. I mean, and I really want to do both.

SPEAKER_00 32:22

Yeah, and both the other piece when you've got a new rector is that there is a whole nother change that's going on at that same time. So to layer those sorts of changes on top of each other makes life challenging.

SPEAKER_05 32:35

Okay, we're wrapping up, but one conversation you want a senior minister to have this month as a takeaway. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 32:43

I can I just conclude there's a few things that we need if these changes that I'm suggesting take place. You've got to have trust. Secondly, uh you've got to recognise that we have been entrusted with resources, not for our sake, but for God's glory. The third thing we've got to realize is you've got to have a mindset not of scarcity, but God's generosity. So we've got to be willing to give to other people and be willing to be humble. It doesn't have to be about me. And so the one thing I'd want to say is have a look at the churches round about you and start to have conversations with those ministers and ask them how we can work together for the kingdom of God to grow.

SPEAKER_05 33:21

And Kirsty, you talked awareness, design, knowledgeability, and reinforcement. Which one do we do worst?

SPEAKER_00 33:28

What we tend to do is actually assume that awareness equals desire. Right. That we think that just by having the conversation, that people will come with us.

SPEAKER_05 33:42

How do I fix that? We've got to go back and back and back and forth.

SPEAKER_00 33:45

You need to spend lots of time having the conversations with people to understand what

Trust Generosity And A One Month Action

SPEAKER_00 33:50

their issues might be, uh, to to keep uh engaging, keep building the trust, uh, keep talking about what's happening.

SPEAKER_05 33:59

Thanks very much for coming in. Kirsty Bucknell has been here. She's an organizational psychologist with Moore Colleges Center for Ministry Development, and Archie Poulos also here, the director of Moore Colleges Centre for Ministry Development. My name's Dominic Steele. You've been with us on the Pastors Art, and we will look forward to your company next Tuesday afternoon.