Welcome to the Beta Woman Leadership Podcast, where our team talks with top leaders about how to better serve and lead your team. Our goal is for you to gain tangible tips on topics such as culture, leadership, succession, and navigating people problems. We hope you enjoyed today's show.
SPEAKER_01Well, this is a first friends. This is the first time I'm introducing part two of a podcast. But you know what? If you hang out with a guy who does hour and a half podcasts before you know it, you're doing an hour podcast. So, Carrie Newhoff, dear friend, been on the show many, many times. We just had too good a conversation to cut it at our normal time, and we thought, well, why not make it a two-week installment? So thanks for listening. We're really glad you're part of our family and hope you'll keep tuning in in the future. Let's shift gears. You started a church. That officially makes you like one of the green berets in I don't know what you call it in Canada, but like the special ops guys are the ones who start a church. Uh yeah, I didn't do that. I worked at older established churches, but then I started a business, and you've done that too. It's not easy, right? But I'm noticing, and I've seen you've been studying this, so this is why I want to bring it up. Why, why is it that the new plant failure rate is so high? And what can we do about it?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I was just doing some research into that, and it's really interesting. I mean, the good news is you can just plant out of nothing. You can say, you know, Q3, hey, we should plant a church, and by January, you're like going, ready to go. The good news is you can do that. The bad news is that might not be the wisest strategy. So there's a multiplicity of factors. I would say a few that sort of spring top of mind. One is do you have the wiring for it? I mean, it takes an entrepreneurial mindset to really start from nothing. Uh, we we actually had a very recently uh a really cool service at one of our locations, is we've been meeting in the theaters for many years since launch, and we're getting ready to open up a new 24-7 facility. So we had our final service in the theaters, and it just brought me back to like the chaos of launching a church. I remember we left a denomination, we were starting over again, and that meant we had to leave all of our assets and liabilities with the denomination. We had offered them a really nice deal. I thought it was a nice deal. They said no, so they're they're entitled to say no. That's fine. So we literally started without a bank account, no charitable status. And I had to raise like over half a million dollars in 10 days. And I'm like calling people, finding them on vacation, on the golf course. I I remember John, it was funny. We were remembering John, he was a chair of our elders. He passed away a few years ago. But I found him, he goes, What do you want, Carrie? I'm on the golf course in Scotland. I'm like, I need your money, man. Like, we gotta get started here. It was more uh I'd known him for years, right? But it was just that kind of like, and we did it. We raised, by the grace of God, half a million dollars in 10 days over that. So that was amazing. So that's not for the faint of heart. Then we had to figure out double portable, then we had to figure out launch windows, and you know, we came within an inch of our life 18 months after launching and uh and survived that, and the church is thriving now, which is which is great, but like it's not for the faint of heart. So are you are you signing up for that? The second thing though is um there's new data, this could be ARC data, I think, that shows a direct correlation between the size of your launch team and the amount of money you raised pre-launch and the success of the church. So it's basically a good rule of thumb. It's you you'll always find exceptions, is your core team. So if you have 25 core team, these are people who are bought in, they're giving, they're volunteering, they're serving, you get a couple of board members out of that, whatever, uh, multiply it by three, you'll have a launch of about 75. But if you grow that core team, and this will take longer to 75, then you multiply that by three, you'll have a launch in excess of 200. If you have a core team of 100, you're probably gonna get a launch Sunday with about 300 people. If you have a core team of 150, I mean the math just goes up and up and up. And the same is true, I think um, you know, if if you raise 70,000 uh before you launch, you're gonna end up with about 25 people at your church. If you raise 300,000, that seems to be a real threshold. Over 300,000, you will end up uh in the hundreds after a church plan. Because, you know, first Sunday, everybody shows up, the mayor shows up, your mom shows up, your cousin shows up, all the other churches are there to kick the tires, and then they all go home and suddenly you're half of what you were the Sunday you launched. So those are some trends I'm seeing. And you know, you got to be signing up for that. So I would say, you know.
SPEAKER_01What do you think? Um like I I don't think the entrepreneurial spirit is in any way qualitatively more like Christ than anybody else. It's just a weird wiring. Well, it's apostolic, right? Like it's it's like like to make it cookies on the bottom shelf. The people I know who succeed at this are people who would step on a rake and get hit in the face nine times in a row and look at the 10th rake and say, it's gonna be different this time. Let's do it. There is a resilience, a hundred percent.
SPEAKER_02You have to be resilient because you get shot at, you get surprises along the way. And I remember 18 months into planning connexus, um, we had I'd through my exceptional leadership skills grown the church from about 900 to about 350 after 18 months, and it was brutal. And my finance department said there's $5,000 left in the bank. And I said, I take it that's not good. And they're like, that is not good. And, you know, we were we paid all of our bills, but it was like, you know, musical chairs just trying to figure out what to pay, what, when, and and everything. And I just remember sitting around with our core team and I thought, I don't have a playbook for this. Like I'd been in leadership for almost 15 years, and I'm like, I don't, I don't know what to do. And we had to cut our advertising budget, our outreach budget, all of that. And I just sat down with a group of leaders, um, a couple of meetings, and I just said, Look, I don't know what's going on, I don't know how to fix it. I believe in this mission. We had to cut our advertising budget, we had to cut this. Here's the truth. If this group, us, if we're not excited enough about this mission to invite our friends, we should just close our doors. Like if you guys aren't gonna go out and invite your friends, let's just call it a day. And I mean, we still had 350 people, but when you're used to 900, you know, that doesn't feel very good. And after that, it just turned around. You know, there were 358 people the next week and then 362, and you know, now it's a lot bigger than that and successful, and you know, many capital campaigns later, we're in great shape. But like that, those are the moments that nothing prepared you for. And I remember going into an elders' meeting, and one of the elders who I saw on Sunday, still part of our church, he just looked at me and he goes, You think this could fail? I'm like, Absolutely, I think this could fail. And he goes, This is not a good feeling. You're supposed to believe in this. And I'm like, Yeah, but it's a leader's job to name reality. And like, we gotta we gotta look at this, guys. Like, if this doesn't turn around, we're we're done.
SPEAKER_01Totally. And and you're talking like a let's call it a kingdom entrepreneur. You sound like a business person when you're making that, and when you're pitching, what I've had to learn the hard way was when I'm pitching to successful business people, it's an entirely different proposition. It's not play on the heartstrings and oh, don't you want to help make it? It is um we have a need of a hundred thousand dollars to pay for these exact things. Would you be willing to, if we get those things in place, the following things will happen. And I I was so sheepish about doing anything like that. I was just aweshock, sort of. And a businessman that joined our church, very first church I was a senior pastor, 27 years old, and I can't believe people were dumb enough to hire me. But uh, I guess they didn't have a search firm then. But uh he said to me, I I said, Well, uh we'll just call him Bobby. Bobby, you know, what do you think about this? And maybe you want to give some. He said, William, I have a line of people out my door every day asking me for money. I know how to say no. Just tell me what you want me to give and what it will do if I give an amount, and I'll listen. And that has just never failed me.
SPEAKER_02Good for him.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, he taught me well.
SPEAKER_02By the way, I'm not issuing that story I just told you as prescriptive. This is what you should do. Go call it a day with your elders. It's descriptive. That's what I did because I didn't know what else to do. And in our case, that was bottom. And then God graciously provided and people started inviting, and people came again. But yeah, like that's not normal operating procedure. You need a stomach for that. You have to be able to bounce back, and it's that Stockdale paradox where you know you're you're you name brutal reality. This is hard, and you never lose hope. You never lose hope. And so I hadn't lost hope. It was just, it was dimming a little bit, and I'm like, we gotta figure this out because this is, you know, your job as a leader is to name reality, and it's not always because otherwise you're delusional, right? You're delusional and like, oh, things are going great, and everyone's going around going, this doesn't look great to me. So it's that it's that tension that you've got. And I think there's a lot of parallels. I haven't done any work on this, but it'd be a fun project between church planning and church revitalization. I think when you look at the number of churches in America, over 300,000, if we had a church planter mentality into churches that need to be revitalized, because that was first project for me coming to the three little churches back in 1995. You know, there are half a dozen people left. You got nothing left. You got to revitalize. And so we almost planted a church within a church, and we did it again uh 15 years later when we left the denomination. So, yeah, 12 years later. So, yeah, that those are just realities about church planting. Now, the good news is I just heard literally, I was emailing Warren Byrd today, our mutual friend, um, the number of church plants in the U.S. has gone up significantly. It's almost doubled since COVID. So there's new data that's coming out. It went from something like 3,000 church plants a year to 6,000. So that data will be coming out now, very soon. Uh, and that's good news. So we need more planters, and new churches tend to grow. Yeah, a lot of them are failing, but if you look at what is really driving any church growth, there's a disproportionate number of new churches there. Young leaders, lots of energy.
SPEAKER_01It's great. And I don't have the data in front of me, but I would bet there's a strong correlation between established churches that are growing and established churches that are planting churches.
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah. Yeah. Multi-site planting churches, lean staff ratios, right? You can get bloated. And ironically, what's really surprising is churches that have higher per capita giving tend to be declining. If you're really reaching people and you're growing, you you are, you know, you're burning a lot of calories and you don't have quite enough fuel to sustain you financially. Because if you're really reaching new people and they're coming to faith, they're not automatic tithers. They're not that. You've got to disciple them, you gotta, you've got to help them along in their journey, you've got to show what you want for them, not just what you want from them. So, you know, there's a lot of positives, but yeah, uh it's something I was I was talking to Ed Stetszer when I was writing this piece on church planning. Something like within four years, two-thirds of all church plants have failed, a third of all church plants have failed, and another third are struggling very deeply. In other words, momentum's going in the wrong direction. So extrapolate that and maybe a quarter to a third survive long term.
SPEAKER_01And and not to not to try and put lipstick on a pig, but that's a better success rate than small business startups. Yeah so uh there you go. I will say, you know, something that I'm seeing uh it's really hard to create a new giver, especially now that there are it used to be there weren't so many ways to give money. Now you can round up at the grocery store for a dollar, you know, the extra dollar up.
SPEAKER_02You get you can that's not really giving people. That's my theory. That's not really giving people.
SPEAKER_01You used to give at the church or to the school fundraiser, but now everywhere there is, I mean, then the it back to politics, the people that are winning are the ones that are able to cultivate one, five, ten dollar donations in mass and not just the super money. But uh, you know, to develop that donor, what I'm seeing now is if you can get them volunteering their hours first, the wallets will follow after. And uh one of the people who's told me a lot about this is our our friend Eric Geiger. Yeah, Mariner's Church. Uh we had the pleasure of of conducting the search that ended up with him there. And uh he's just a genius. But long before that, he was an associate pastor in Florida, and he wrote a book called Simple Church that many listeners have heard.
SPEAKER_02I was required reading 20 years ago.
SPEAKER_01Right. So I said to him, he he called us, he was leaving to go to Lifeway. He said, need you to replace me, find the next guy. So I was sitting interviewing, I'm like, how when he went there, the church was 1700, he's the associate pastor, no change in senior leadership, it goes to 9,000. And it's pretty much just the systems Eric put in play. He wouldn't say that, he'd, you know, say it much more wholly than that. I'm like, Eric, how do you what are you doing? How do you grow a ministry without growing dollars? He said, Oh, that's easy. If I want to grow a ministry, I grow the volunteer base by 25%. And I know that within a year the ministry will grow 25%. I thought, why did no one tell me this? Just what you were saying about launch teams. Like the larger the core group, the better your launch. You want to grow a team.
SPEAKER_02Engagement is a new attendance, right? Everyone's focused on attendance, but those are lag measures, like a hundred people or a thousand people on a Sunday, those are lag measures. And the lead measure is engagement. The lead measure is are these people bought into the vision? Are they serving? Do they have skin in the game? That's right. And the other the other thing I think, and I don't want to take away from anything you said, but just to add a small footnote, another thing that I think is really helpful, at least in our experience, because half the people who walk through our doors and stick around don't have a church background. So there's no Baptist memory about tithing or, you know, yeah, mom and dad used to tithe. You know, they don't know what a tithe is. A tith? What's a tith, right? They have no idea. So what we do is, and most people are in uh they're underwater financially. It's like too much debt, uh, they bought too much house, they're driving five car payments, you know, they have too many vehicles in the driveway, all that stuff. And so what we do is we focus on what we want for them, not just what we want from them. And so we come along and we offer independent financial advice for them, just budgeting one-on-one, William. Like for a lot of your listeners, it'll be pretty basic, but it's not like you look at Dave Ramsey as made an industry out of teaching people what we all should have known, right? Oh, don't spend more money than you make. That is rocket science. That's why he has an audience. And uh we just come alongside people and we say, hey, this is not just about we want you to give. This is like we want to serve you and we want to help you drive a car, not a car payment. We want to help you save for your kids' education, and we'll just give you some pointers along the way. And when you do that through a financial piece university or a learning environment, whatever you happen to do, people are like, wow, you don't just want my money, you actually care about the whole person. Well, of course we do. Jesus does, God does. And then they're like, okay, well, now I can live with margin and live on mission. So we've had a lot of success with that too.
SPEAKER_01That's really good. Well, so um you're you're a pastor right now. And I I I, you know, I was a pastor, senior pastor for, I don't know, 15, 16 years, but I did not live through the last five years as a pastor, nor did I have everything that I preach recorded digitally on a footprint somewhere that lives forever.
SPEAKER_02I don't know how people waiting for someone to trip you up as soon as they find out.
SPEAKER_01Oh my gosh, we placed a guy at a fairly good-sized church, large church. And like the day before we presented him to the board, along with several others, he he called me frantically. He texted me, is it too late to call you? No, it's fine. It's like 11 at night or something like that. It's like, I'm not bothering you. I said, now you you will have to go a long way to beat Eric Geiger for a number of phone calls at weird hours. So I'll I said, What why are you worried? He said, Well, I was going through my social media to make sure there's nothing that would hurt you know the presentation of the board. I said, What do you mean you went through social media? Well, I I've I went through my tweets and I said, We'll call him Carrie. Carrie, how many tweets have you sent? He said, 16,197. I said, Oh, probably sounds like Carrie. Enormous pressure to not mess up. There is enormous pressure to say what you need to say, but don't say too much and don't take a political stand, but don't not take and then there's the pressure of raising the money and the volunteer. This is leading to some burnout. And I know you've been through that. I uh if you want to share a little of your story, that's great. Uh uh, I'm really interested to know what you've learned about how to spot it so people don't have to pay the burnout tax that you paid.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I paid a big one, and that was uh 18 years ago, and I had been in leadership for over a decade. It was uh like 30% growth year after year after year, which you know, you look at all the Harvard business stuff, that's not sustainable. And it wasn't sustainable for me. And my answer was uh, by the way, the better answer to that is you should grow at the level that your systems are capable of sustaining that growth. I think there's a lot of wisdom in that. Anyway, uh I my answer was more people equals more hours, and it landed me flat on my back. And it wasn't, you know, it was it was like um, you know, the signs for me were absolute exhaustion. So I was literally on a high. I had just spoken in front of the largest crowd I'd ever spoken at to date in Atlanta, flew home feeling like I was on top of the world, my family was with me, and when I landed, it's like all the energy got sucked out of my body. And I'd never been in that place before. It was a total surprise. Not like a shock. Like, yeah, I'd been tired before, but uh I didn't recover easily. Like normally, if you're tired, it's like, well, go to bed early and sleep in and you'll be fine, you know. Do that for a couple of nights. Rest and sleep didn't um help me recover. They didn't. They made it worse. I took three weeks off and I felt worse at the end, and it started to present as depression. Another sign to watch for in burnout is that your optimism is gone. You basically become a cynic. And I became deeply, deeply cynical in that summer of 2006. Another sign that that a lot of leaders, because I I've taught this around the world, but this one really resonates with people, is your emotions don't work properly. The way your emotions are supposed to work, designed by God, is you're supposed to be happy when people are happy, you're supposed to be sad when people are sad. And when you're burned out, usually you just feel numb. You don't feel anything. So somebody tells you that they just got diagnosed with cancer and you've got a good game face, right? Like, oh, I'm really sorry to hear that, William. That's too bad. But on the inside, it's like nothing. Or someone says, Hey, we were expecting our first child. And again, you got a game face like, great, good for you, but on the inside, there's there's nothing. Or when you feel your emotions, when they do come up, they're completely inappropriate. So someone did leave the milk out on the counter and you have a nuclear meltdown. Well, it's a three out of ten, you know, but you're just like, I hate this family, and that-day, and I don't know why you peel, and you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Or the opposite, your wife tells you, you know, I'm thinking about divorcing you, and you're like, oh, okay. All right. Like just totally out of balance, right? So you're way too hot or way too dead. So those are some of the signs. And another one is nothing's funny anymore. You don't laugh anymore, uh, you don't find anything funny. So there's numerous signs like that. And I think there's two levels of burnout, William. One is like, you know, you're burned out, you can't function anymore. I got out of bed every day, but it was like I am broken. And I went to counseling and I had great people around me. And for me, it was a period of months, not years. I got I got back and 18 years, it's almost like saying 18 years sober, 18 years healthy. I haven't burned out again. I've been tired, but I haven't burned out. I'm very thankful and I hope to continue that, you know, and help leaders continue that for the rest of my life. I'm passionate about that. Because once you're there, you wouldn't wish that on anybody. And so, you know, definitely try to get better. But there's there's like full-on burnout where you just know you're burned out. But then there's what I, and again, I'm not a psychologist, but I call it mid grade burnout. And that's when the joy of when the functions of life continue, but the joy of life is gone. And there's a lot of leaders there who's like, Yeah, I'm getting up every day, I'm taking the kids to sports, you know, my marriage isn't falling apart, I'm still leading.
SPEAKER_01I think that's a lot of people carrying. That's Jack and Diane, you know. It is. It goes on long after the thrill of living is gone. You know? Uh huh. 100%. And I'll tell you what's so helpful. Uh, we're gonna we're gonna make a list of these warning signs Carrie's put out there and put it in the show notes because many should just make that little checkbox. Yeah, make it your checklist for Monday morning. Everyone's burned out on Monday morning. It's okay. Yeah, don't do that on Monday. I use out voicemail, but it was just me running the company. I was the only one besides the dog. Oh, I had my voicemail set up on Monday. Said, if you're calling me about a new job, call me on Tuesday.
SPEAKER_02You'll feel better.
SPEAKER_01Literally.
SPEAKER_02No, you know what? And we have a we have a test people can take if they want. It's free. It's at burnoutindicator.com. Burnoutindicator. Burnoutindicator.com. You can just go there. This is this is one of my passions and will be for the rest of my life because I I have a real heart for leaders. It's hard out there, it's hard in business, it's especially hard in ministry because we're in the perfect storm where faith and your work and community collide. It's hard for people. So I get it. But you know, and and and the good news is if you've got mid-grade burnout, that's easier to recover from. Um you can you can ease off. And what you need is sustainable rhythms. And I burned out before social media was there, but in 2006 it wasn't what it is now. What it is now is just like super complicated. Um you're on 24-7. You need boundaries. I got a couple of texts from one or two from like A-list players. I could name the name, and everybody would know who I'm saying yesterday. And I'm like, you know what? I'm out on my boat, I'm out with friends, we're going for dinner with my pastor who succeeded me. I'm gonna get to that tomorrow. Old me would have been like, oh, I gotta get to that right now. Sorry, sorry guys, sorry guys, sorry. And I'm like, I need boundaries, I need rest. It's taken me years, but I'm finally to the point where I'm like, I got a day off and I'm excited about it. I don't sit there guilty going, I could work on that book, or maybe I should do some research, or maybe and pastors just have a hard time. And uh, I've talked to, you know, you mentioned the podcast earlier, Cal Newport about this, you know, the author of Deep Work and Slow Productivity. And we've got some strategies that can really help leaders uh avoid that, but you need to carve out some channels apart from that sabbatical that comes once every seven years or never. Because how many leaders have you talked to, Willie? Well, you must a lot. You m you would get a statistically disproportionate number of leaders who are back from sabbatical, and three months after their six-month fully paid for amazing sabbatical, they're done and they want another church or they're leaving ministry, or the elder board calls you and says, Our pastor who just got back from sabbatical is finished. What do we do? Why is that?
SPEAKER_01We we actually um we do sabbatical, I mean, like what do we do for sabbatical? So we've done study like what's actually normal and what's not, because it's all over the board, right? And one thing we suggest is um the sabbatical is not fully paid for. The sabbatical the sabbatical is paid for over the three years after you get back. Ah the forgiveness. Even if you're not burned out, you go away for six months, you come back saying, What do I want to do with my life? Maybe I should try something. It's a very common thing to move on to the next thing after sabbaticals. We actually put in some uh uh some teeth in it. Well, if you really feel called away, then you're gonna have to pay for that sabbatical you just took. And it it it does tamp things down. But what what's super interesting is boards, when we first started doing this, we're like, that's gonna scare the pastor off. And you just need to tell them if you need more time, please tell me. If you need another day off, please tell me. And do you know how many church boards have turned their nose up at that? Exactly. Zero. You would be surprised, pastors, if you go to your people asking for help, they if nothing else, out of selfish preservation, they will give it to you. Because I unfortunately, I mean, there's been a rash. I I don't know if it's more press coverage or we're on 24-7 or what, but it feels like there's leader after leader after leader that's you know falling or tripped up or whatever the, you know, they're disqualified, whatever word you, I'm not trying to make light, but but and we have to go in and clean up behind those messes quite often. Yeah. And uh every time we see a pastor who has colored outside the lines or or uh I don't want to sound trivial, but like they got a red card, right? I can draw a straight line from that red card back to a tired pastor every single time. So if you're if you're bashful about asking about time off, I would bet your board will listen to you more than you think.
SPEAKER_02That's such a good point. And the other thing, you know, this is just a theory, that's what I do, is I come up with theories as I look at all the patterns in the data. But the problem with sabbatical when you come back, or even think about a vacation. You know, you took two weeks off in July or a month off in July or something like that. And you come back, and on the first Monday back, you feel like you got hit by a bus. What is that? Time off isn't the problem, but time won't heal you when the problem is how you spend your time on. So I don't think it's not necessarily like a Sabbath ritual. Okay, let's say you take a full Sabbath every week. Good for you. But if you've got six killer days, you're not you're not designed for that. You're not designed to grind six days a week. You're designed to work five or six days a week. You're not designed to grind five days a week. You're not supposed to be working 20-hour days Monday to Friday and have a Saturday off and then do Sunday. But, you know, and let's be honest. Uh I took Saturdays off, but Sunday's always on your mind. It just is. So what you mean is a sustainable pace, right? Like what is what is a sustainable pace? That is the cure for an unsustainable pace. It's a sustainable pace. So that means do you have uh a discipline that allows you to shut down the laptop at 4 o'clock or 5 o'clock on a Wednesday and go home and be fully present with your family for dinner, be fully present at the kids' soccer game or you know, whatever sport they happen to be in, or dance, or whatever it is, to be able to go to bed on time and like not pick up your phone again? Have you got a triage system for emergencies? Because everything presents as an emergency, but it's an emergency to them, it's not an emergency to you. Like if I follow and it's like, William, my marriage is in crisis. It's not. It was years ago, it's not now. William, my marriage is in crisis. I need to talk to you tonight. Very typical pastoral call. Did your marriage somehow inflame between noon and 3 p.m.? No, it's been a downward trend for months, years, but the pain got so bad for that person that they called you at five o'clock as you were sitting down with your family for the evening and said, I gotta see you tonight. I'm in trouble. Now, a better answer to that is to have a system where they can book an appointment. And you know what? I can't see you tonight, but we could meet tomorrow at two or next Monday. I'll give you an example. Uh, when my last book, At Your Best, came out, uh, you know the Corcoran group, Barbara Corcoran from Shark Tank. So her company called me from New York. They had read the book and they're like, we want you to coach some of our salespeople. So this is New York real estate. There's no more expensive real estate in the country. And I've I've sold one house in my life, right? I've lived in two houses. So I mean, I'm not an expert in real estate. And so it was a little bit intimidating. And they're we're going through the concepts, and they're like, Yeah, but we have no boundaries. We're New York real estate. And I'm like, well, give me some real examples. Well, you know, a client wants to go see a commercial building, and again, they're something hundred million dollar buildings. So way out of my league. I'm a pastor from rural Canada. Okay, so way out of my league. And and I just said, All right, well, let's role play a little bit. I said, uh, so you get a client who calls you and says, I want to see this building. I said, can you tell them? Great, I've got two times. I can show you the building Monday at 10 a.m. or Tuesday at 3 p.m. Do either of those work for you? And they looked at me and they're like, Yeah, that would work. And I'm like, well, so how come you're not doing it? And they looked at me and said, We've never thought of it. We just never thought about it. And it's like a lot of this stuff is very, very fixable and reasonable people respect those boundaries. Now, if you've got the sale of the century going, show it on a Saturday. If you've got if someone's in a car accident and a child's on life support in the hospital, go make that visit Wednesday at five o'clock. Like, but how often a year does that happen?
SPEAKER_01Hopefully, never, maybe once or twice a year. And what triage system do you have in place? Right. Answer none. Right. All the messages have easy. Like I had it, I had it a lot easier. I was at big churches, I had a full-time executive assistant, I had a pastoral of pastoral care, like, you know, but the normal life for a pastor in the U.S. is 109 people showing up on the weekend, about four families control the church. You are the only stopgap for all these things. So what are you doing? And I'm gonna put it back on the pastors. What are you doing to tell your congregation I will respond to you? But here's the tree of like at our office, if you email me after hours, I will get back to you within a day. That will happen, right? If you slack me using the platform Slack after hours, I'm gonna get back to you at my very next convenience after I finish dinner with the family. But you've sent a Slack, that's DEF CON 2. You text me after hours, it's like, oh my goodness. Okay, I better. And and then if you call me after hours, the building's on fire. Exactly. We have we must cut down on the number of fun texts I have with coworkers after hours because you can't do you, but the discipline of it, I love what you're saying. Develop a triage.
SPEAKER_02We had the same triage. We we use our channels a little bit differently than you, but the same idea. If I get a text from a team member after hours, it is really important. If it's a phone call, the building's on fire. And the other way we celebrate wins, we have a real tiny team, but the way we celebrate wins, like one of our guys who's basically our COO was off for 10 days. And the way we celebrate is did you do any work while you were away? No? All right, break out the piñata. Like we're celebrating, right? Fantastic. That's great. Did anybody the idea is to allow yourself to truly unplug and to truly rest? Now, to do that, you need systems. So Cal Newport said when I interviewed about him, like, what about the pastor who, you know, is available on Facebook, X, Instagram, you're getting DMs all over the place, LinkedIn, your email, your cell phone number, all that stuff. He goes, simple. Have a process on your website or on social media that your congregation just train them. And you're like, if you have a baptism request, it goes to baptism at you know xchurch.com. If you got a pastoral care request, great. It goes to pastoral care at and it gets looked at within 24 hours by an assistant or something. Increasingly, you can sift that through AI. Doesn't have to be in personal, but AI can do that for you. And then you can get back. But basically, there's a triage system because that's what 911 does. When you call 911, it's like police fire or ambulance, right? What's your emergency? They don't send they don't send in the SWAT team for a fender brother. That's so good. They don't. They try to figure it out. It's like, oh, you got a fender, but anybody injured? No. Do you need an ambulance? No. Just property damage. Just pull over to the side of the road. Officer will be there soon. Okay.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. But and there are I I'm just going to say it. There are mean people in church.
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah. Who are like, no, you need to be here at five o'clock.
SPEAKER_01Run you over because they have no one else to boss around in life, and they're the you're the one place they can flex. But I think most people, if you say, Hey, I want to be here a long time, I want to be healthy for you for a long time, here's how that's going to work. I think most people, and I learned this uh firsthand when I was a really young senior pastor, and a guy took me under his wing to mentor me, John Maxwell. And John's been a dear friend for many, many, many years. Uh, and I remember when we first got to know each other and we'd played a couple rounds of golf, and then he decided, okay, I'm gonna mentor you. And he said in that big voice that only John can do, uh, and this is a long time ago, this was a much bigger deal. He said, here is my cell phone number. You are the 26th person on the planet to have this number. I'm like, ooh, you know, and he said, Now listen to me carefully. If you ever need me, call me. If you don't need me, don't call me. Do you know how often I've called him? Like twice in 20 years. You're shaking, you're shaking. Right.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01It just makes it clear.
SPEAKER_02No, I mean like I started with a handful of people, and then you're the pastor to everybody. Like when there's six people going to your church, you've got time to go to the hospital, you've got time to check in. And then we hit 100, and then we hit 200, and then it got difficult to our mutual friend Warren Byrd, who wrote that book with Carl George about breaking church growth barriers. I read that back in the day, they've reissued it since then. And I'm like, okay, I can't do this anymore. And by the time we got to 800 to 1,000 people, like our church had been trained. You look to each other for care, you look to other people, and it almost got lonely at times. People would be like, Oh, I can't, I can't, I can't talk to you because you're too busy. I'm like, I'm not that busy, actually. It's not that bad.
SPEAKER_01But you have to train a church. Set the triage, set the system. It's interesting to me that in a much simpler world with no social media, no television or radio to distract, no cars to get anywhere you wanted to get. I got to drive across town. When we were on foot and agrarian, God said, All right, I'm gonna lay some rules out for the Sabbath. It's like the most legislated thing in the Bible. And there's a reason. It's not because God's mean. It's like you won't do it if there aren't rules. In fact, I remember I just if I'm really honest, it was for the money, but there was a scholarship if you could memorize the Westminster Catechism, and I did it at Princeton. Probably the best class I took at Princeton was memorizing that thing. And I didn't realize till I did that. There are more words in the fourth commandment about rest than all other nine commandments added together. God couldn't waste time, he took more time to instruct us about a triage system, about a, you know. So I just you're totally right.
SPEAKER_02And and I think it's our attempt, my I'll just reflect on my own. It's like we all like to play God, we all like to be the important person. We love being needed. And that's not that's not necessarily healthy for anybody. And you know, the the the trajectory I was on in my 30s before I burned out was I put too many people ahead of my family. And that that is what gets you in trouble, that's what synks your marriage. And fortunately, you know, my wife and I, we've not only survived, we're in a period that's really great. And I have a great relationship with my kids now and everything, and they're like, Dad, it really wasn't that bad when we're little. I'm like, well, it was bad in my mind, you know, but it was it it you you sacrifice the people closest to you. And the people, because you know, most of those people aren't going to be at your funeral. The people who'll be at your funeral, surviving spouse, your kids, your family, some close friends, and those are the people that you sacrifice in the name of trying to please everybody. And I would say to that problem person that you said who's like, no, you need to be here Wednesday at five o'clock, and I know it's dinner, okay. Listen, if they were in a car accident, they're on life support. Yeah, drop what you're doing and go. But again, that's very rare. But if they're just that difficult person, you just set up a boundary and you're like, you know what? I have Thursday at two and uh next Tuesday at eleven. Which one do you prefer? And if they squawk and scream and squawk and scream, let them squawk and scream. One of two things will happen. They'll get healthy or they'll leave. One of the two. And if they leave, what are you really losing?
SPEAKER_01A problem. I I think you're right. I think most people, now, you know, we need a savior, we're not perfect, you know, all that. But but most people are pretty reasonable when you lay out your rules.
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah. Don't 99 out of a hundred people are gonna respect that. And you know, it'll take repeated, it's like anytime you set up a boundary, it's gonna take a while for people to learn. But you know, if you got a small church, teach it. I would. I'm like, hey, you guys need to know we got a lot of people here. I'm not gonna be able to be at your hospital bed all the time anymore. I'm not gonna be able, you gotta care for each other. Look, look at look around you, look in the pews. This is the body of Christ. You guys need to start caring for each other. Do you understand that? Because look, I can't do it all. I would I would teach that way. And you know, some people don't like it. Well, good news is there is even in Canada lots of small little churches where the pastor will do all that stuff for you. And I'm like, you guys can go there. If that's really your defining characteristic of a great church, go there because this isn't gonna be your church, you're not gonna be happy.
SPEAKER_01It took me, I was that guy, and it took me a long time to figure out, and only in hindsight, that it wasn't really there were mean people, it was that I was confusing myself with the savior. I'm all fix it, I'm all rescue it. I mean, we go into ministry because we believe the rescue story, right?
SPEAKER_02So, but then we I tried to embody it, but yeah, you know a great way to get over the Messiah complex is to continue to attend a church you no longer lead. So it's been no kidding. No kidding. Yeah, yeah, and Gordon McDonald's advice to me, not George, but Gordon's, was because I asked him about it. I was on the teaching team, I carried a full teaching load for four years after not being the lead pastor, then a halftime teaching load. Now I teach once or twice a year, and I just attend. I attend with my wife, we give, we we help, we coach, whatever. Uh we're part of a small group, but we're just a member. And uh it's really cool because half the people have no idea who I am. Um and Gordon's advice to me was they forget you quickly. And so right now you're sacrificing, you're working really hard. Guess what? They forget you quickly. There's not even a picture of me at our church anymore. That's fine. We don't have pictures of past pastors. It doesn't matter, but you're you're gonna be obscure in no time, and no one's gonna remember your name. And so you're sacrificing your marriage for that and your parenting for that. I'm not talking about being lazy. I work hard, I love what I get to do, and I hustle, but I cannot hustle. And when you're hustling 18, 20 hours a day, six days a week, guess what? You're not hustling. You're brain dead. You're staring at a blinking cursor, going, what do I write? If you actually, if you actually slow down and you get proper sleep and you exercise, I'm gonna work out. When we sign off, I got a workout scheduled right down the hall. Built a little home gym. Um, you know, I'm gonna work out, I'm gonna take care of myself. We're going out on the boat tonight with family, and I put in a good, honest day's work. So you can do the same thing.
SPEAKER_01And most people will respect your boundaries. I have not respected your boundaries. I told you, oh, we usually only go 30 minutes.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you really blew your podcast format on this one. I know.
SPEAKER_01I see. It's because you've got so many good things to say, Carrie. I I really appreciate it. I do want to hit you with just a hot seat question. You can answer 10 seconds or one minute, however long you want. Tell me, you're you're almost 10 years into your podcast. We started right at the same time. Yeah. In 10 years, what are some of the most valuable lessons you've learned about interviewing skills? Is that the past you're doing that with other people? I mean, I think it's valuable for people to know. And you you're better at it than anybody I know.
SPEAKER_02Well, thank you. Two, number one, I almost have an invisible sticky on my monitor that says, shut up, let the guests talk. So Tony, my wife, gave me that feedback five episodes in. I've never forgotten it. And so when I'm interviewing, I try to be very quiet and let the guests talk, even into awkward silences, because they're used to being cut off, like, oh, we're on broadcast TV or we're on to the next question. And then often they'll just pause and then they'll be like, oh, okay. And then they tell you more, and that's where the goal is. The other thing is follow the curiosity trail. And you did that in this podcast, you just kept asking questions. You you so oh, that's interesting. Tell me more, tell me more, tell me more. So those are the two. Let the guests talk and um and um follow the curiosity trail. And you know, that's less to an hour and five minutes. It's pretty good.
SPEAKER_01Pretty good. And uh let me encourage you if you are a pastor out there listening, we have a lot of different people that listen, but uh, you might consider interviewing somebody from your congregation that's in the business world, something interesting, that can talk about their faith. An interview, I think, draws more attention than a monologue.
SPEAKER_02But that's I'm experimenting with solo episodes, and I think I prefer the interviews. The other thing about it's why why is sports radio so or news talk radio so interesting? Call in shows? Because it's not scripted. You're listening to someone on the Ramsey show, it's like, yeah, my husband and I, we have four hundred thousand dollars in debt, we have two hundred thousand dollars in student debt, we don't know what to do. You've heard that call a thousand times. Why is it interesting? Because it's live and it's a real person, right? Why is sport? I mean, you know, some guy who hasn't worked out in 20 years has some opinion on why his team lost last night's game. Why is that interesting? Because it's a real conversation. And so if you have a real conversation, um it's easy to bring an audience in on it.
SPEAKER_01You know what brought that to the American media is the NFL. Really? They were the first sport to broadcast with more than one announcer.
SPEAKER_02I didn't know that.
SPEAKER_01So that's cool.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, but real conversation. I mean, people are just built for that, right? So it's it's a very uh low bar to entry in the podcast world. If you're just gonna do something small for your church or that kind of thing, do interviews because everyone's being talked to by experts all the time.
SPEAKER_01Well, at burnoutindicator.com. Yeah. I think that was the link. Uh but I'd also love for people to know where they can find you. So give us a quick rundown on the easiest places to find you and and and if there's anything fresh we should be know it know about and uh pay attention to.
SPEAKER_02Sure. Uh Carrie Newhoff on Instagram, CarrieNewhoff.com. Like your name, just misspell it. You'll eventually find it. The Google is very nice that way. And we got a brand new course coming out called uh The Art of Navigating Church Conflict. And not only the podcast series, but you know, a lot of pastors find that they're leading a pretty inflamed congregation and community these days. So it's uh it's a course. You can go to I think Artofchurchconflict.com, something like that. And uh it's a full course that you can take and hopefully it really, really helps.
SPEAKER_01That's awesome. Carrie, thanks so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.
SPEAKER_02Thank you, William. Appreciate you, your friendship, and all that you do.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and if you're listening today, you want the show notes, just go to Vandercast.com. Give us your email address. You will not get offers for Ginsu Knives. You will not get offers for anything other than the podcast. Just Vandercast.com. We would love for you to be a part of the family, and I look forward to visiting again with you soon.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for listening to the Vanderblumen Leadership Podcast. At Vanderblumen, we help organizations build their best teams through hiring, succession, culture, compensation, and diversity solutions. Visit our website, VanderBloomen.com to learn more and subscribe to our Vanderblumen Leadership Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts to keep up with our latest episodes. Thanks for listening.