Welcome to the Bad Women Leadership Podcast, where our team talks with top leaders about topics that are served in your team. Our goal is for you to gain tangible tips on topics such as culture, leadership, success, and navigating people problems. We hope you enjoyed today's show.
SPEAKER_03Hey friends, you know there's an old saying, show me your friends, I'll show you your future. Well, my friends include Carrie Newhoff, and that means my 30-minute podcast has turned into his length podcast. It's over an hour long, but it's so good. So rather than try and hit you with a curveball and make you listen for an hour, we've split this into two parts. We think you're really going to like it. Listen in and tune in next week for the exciting finish. Thanks for listening. Well, hey everybody. Welcome to the Vanderblumen Leadership Podcast. Let's try that again. The Vanderblumen Leadership Podcast. See, I can't even say it. So don't worry if you can't say it. But if you need to tell a friend about it, just type Vanderblumen however you want into Google. My last name is so messed up, I can't say it, and it'll feed you right to our site if you just try typing it. We're glad you're here today. It's good to be back after a summer break. If you want to hear more about that, we have an episode about why I do that, how you can start to do that. It's really an effort to build sustainability for our company and for my life. And uh I think if you're a leader, it's worth listening. Uh, I I think that's what makes me excited about today, because today I've got the burnout expert of all experts with us, Kerry Newhoff, uh, who is kind of the Jimmy Fallon of the church world. It's pretty amazing how many people you've got in the interview. Thanks for taking time out of a busy schedule to visit with us today, Kerry.
SPEAKER_01Always. It's just nice to be on a podcast with someone else who has an impossible last name. So thank you, William.
SPEAKER_03Well, if you ain't Dutch, you ain't much, right? Exactly. Exactly. Just ask any Dutch person. Oh, that's funny. Well, I, you know, I would bet nearly every listener knows who you are, but it might be worth giving just a quick here's Carrie and how you ended up doing what you're doing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, sure. So when I was a little kid, I wanted to go into law. I went to law school, met the wife of my dreams, uh, was in law for a year, felt a call into ministry, went to seminary, and for the last almost 30 years, have been about an hour north of Toronto uh working with an amazing group of people. We eventually started with mainline church, eventually became non-denominational, and that church went on to become Connexus Church. I led it for 20 years and uh about 10 years ago stepped out of the lead role, nine years ago, I guess, stepped out of the lead role, and for the last decade or so have been really focused on helping church leaders. So I do a leadership podcast. I've written some books, I speak around the world, I host something called the Art of Leadership Academy. And, you know, the way I think about it, William, I went to law school, but nobody taught me how to run a law firm. And I went to seminary and nobody taught me how to run a seminary. So I try to fill in the gaps on all those things nobody teaches you along the way. There's a lot of unhappy lawyers, and I'm I'm not so much in the business world these days, but a lot of uh, you know, church leaders who are well-intentioned, really struggling. How can I get in their corner and help them out with, you know, world-level conversations with Jim Collins, Seth Godin, Craig Rochelle, Priscilla Shire, whoever, you know, we try to get them in the house. And uh, and then also produce some really practical resources on everything from navigating church conflict to uh how to teach without using notes, like all those all those things you're not gonna get at uh even a good seminary. So that's what I do these days.
SPEAKER_03Such a similar path. I I didn't realize this is what I was doing, but when we started, it was like, you know, I went to Princeton for seminary, which is a pretty good degree. And absolutely. I didn't have one bit of instruction about how to run a staff meeting.
unknownNo.
SPEAKER_01Or how to fire somebody. Or hire somebody or fire somebody or personnel, or what about your one-on-one meetings, William? It's like, no, no clue. Yeah. How to figure it all out, right? It's job security for people like you and me.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and fill the fill the the gap between what you learned in school and what you actually need to know.
SPEAKER_01Well, and that's that was the hard part. Like, even doctors really struggle with that. It's like, how do you run, unless you're on staff at a hospital, how do you run a family practice? Lawyers, you know, how do you how do you run a law firm? Like it's really difficult. The signs changing all the time because they don't know how to get along. You know, it used to be Vanderblumen and Newhoff, and now it's Vanderblumen and Vanderblumen, and then it was Newhoff and Newhoff, and now it's something else, you know, like that's the thing with law firms, is because people don't know how to do it, and you have that same challenge of turnover, and uh like, you know, I knew the the theory of how to preach, but and I had a great preacher, but he said, never use the word you and uh never tell personal stories. Well, like personal stories are one of the best ways to connect with people, and we were told to read from manuscripts, not to speak without using notes and things like that. So, you know, I had to unlearn a lot of that, and that was a great, like, great prof. I had to unlearn a lot of it to learn how to actually connect with people, and so you know, it's a supplement, not a replacement for seminary.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, you know, uh Princeton it kind of prides itself on a lot of things, but the preaching curriculum is off the charts and uh really, really good. But you walk away with a they call it the Princeton Lilt. It's like you're a little too snotty, a little too learned, you know. Always C. S. Lewis said he was guilty of intellectual snobbery. That's kind of what happens. Um and I remember uh I don't think I've told you this story, but but real briefly, I came out of seminary and went into an associate pastorate where I got to preach about, I don't know, six or eight times a year or something like that. So I was always looking for ways to go find more preaching reps. I would do funerals for people that didn't have anybody to do the funeral for. I mean, like I found out that the homeless mission uh in town, my little town in North Carolina, would allow me to come preach, and I could preach on Tuesday. Like, great. Uh which Tuesday? Like all of them. So you have to go to you have to go to chapel to get to go to lunch. So it's kind of a force, you know, uh forced devotional. And I was there and I was preaching with my Princeton Lilt and all my good learning and quoting some great theologian or something or another. And uh the I did not have the room, it was so bad, it was awful. And then uh my friend, now a friend, no, I'm then Harry, who's schizophrenic, and you know, a significant percentage of the homeless population is mentally ill in the United States. Of course. And Harry just stood up next to me and started preaching his own sermon while I was preaching. And and eventually he started getting amens, and I got nothing. So I got benched.
SPEAKER_01And Harry to do it. You know, I mean, this is not the purpose of being on your show. We've known each other for a long time. I don't think I ever told you. I was the the weekend that Tiger Woods turned pro, I was in Princeton, New Jersey, lining up to do my PhD in homiletics at Princeton. Had a scholarship all lined up, and then the chair of the department resigned. And I'm like, okay, I don't want to study under other people. I want to study under that guy. And so I stayed here. Tom Long here all these years later.
SPEAKER_03Tom Long is Tom Long preaching. Yeah, teaching class, and he's got a gift.
SPEAKER_01So he taught me how to preach without using notes. I drove him back to the airport once from Toronto, and he said, Don't it was him who gave me the advice. Don't memorize your talk, understand it. And that changed how I communicated. Anyway, he wasn't there anymore, and then I'm like, Well, I'll just stay here and be a pastor. So yeah, well, he was great, and and you know, Princeton stumble or whatever you call that. If you don't have the lilt, you have the stumble. I guess I got the stumble because I didn't go.
SPEAKER_03Well, so many commonalities. I uh my later preaching professor was uh Tim Keller, who I know you befriended in every part of his life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He taught me with Ed Clowney, who was a pretty special that podcast is like on some bootleg.
SPEAKER_01I always find it once in a while, and it's so good. It's really hard to find. But if you can get Clowney and Keller together, I've never killer what they teach.
SPEAKER_02I've never wept during a lecture, except in just so good.
SPEAKER_03Anyway, things that people need to know that maybe they don't need to know about us. I was thinking of several little topics. I mean, you don't have a book coming out, we're not here to push something. This is really how can we tap into what you're learning? And because I don't, you know, the number one question I get is what are you seeing out there? Because pastors, heads of school, heads of nonprofits, they get burrowed down in whatever thing they're they're focused on and they don't know what's going on. And I thought, here, my good friend Carrie, he's out and about, he hears, he sees. And I thought if we could just talk about a few trends, I would love to hear what you're hearing to try and help uh our listeners. And I'm gonna go ahead and just roll a grenade to start. Um you chose to do a podcast series on the presidential election in the United States. I did. Are you on medication?
SPEAKER_01What is and it's not going well. I'm off my meds, I guess, or something. You know what? It was it was it was really interesting because I was talking to friends about it, and you know, I I have uh an interest in America. Most of my audience is American, even though I'm Canadian. I have a degree in American politics and history. Um, my wife's an American. So there's a lot of ties to the country. And and still, I mean, as go Americas, so goes the world, right? Like you look at that. And honestly, my approach as a pastor is to stick my head in the sand and hope it all disappears and we'll just, you know, come up for air in December or January or whatever, February, and it'll all be back to normal. And I thought that's kind of a coward's way out. So I had a problem in that I don't know how to really tackle that well, and I don't like what I'm seeing. And I think most people don't like what they're seeing because you hear from two extremes, and most of us aren't on one of those extremes. So I thought, well, I'm gonna do some research. So I reached out to some of the the brightest thinkers I know who could maybe talk some sense into us. And it's not really, you know, Harris versus Trump. That's not the purpose of the podcast series that we aired or are airing, depending on what this airs. Um, but it was really to get at the issue under the issue. Like we're in a cultural and ideological divide right now, and our culture has become more polarized, more tribalized, hate has been monetized. And I really wanted to get on the issues under the issues, and then I wanted to talk to people like everyone from Ed Stetzer to NT Wright to Mark Sayers on well, if you're gonna speak politically, what do you say? Like, do you just pick a side? And nobody, nobody, you know, conservative or liberal, is like, yeah, as a faithful preacher of the gospel, you should pick a side. But what I'm really happy about with the series is it kind of got to the issues under the issues. Why is everybody so inflamed? Why is everybody so upset? And what you learn is that 95% of the problems in the church have nothing to do with the church. That, yeah, you might get a super angry email, William, about uh, you know, if you were preaching, why you picked a side, why you didn't pick a side, why you should have picked a side, why you picked the wrong side, why you said something too loudly, too softly, too, you know, it doesn't matter what you do. And when I talk to pastors, and we have the privilege of talking to hundreds, if not, you know, more pastors all the time, and you're in trouble no matter what you do today. If you're quiet, you're in trouble for being quiet. If you're loud, you're in trouble for being loud. If you said something, you didn't say it quite the right way. And anybody in in day-to-day ministry right now can identify with that. And so what's going on there? Well, I I had the privilege on my podcast earlier this year to interview William Urey. And I was introduced to his stuff at law school. He is the textbook on negotiation. If you're going to study negotiation, you study William Urey. And um, he's still like helping the U.S. government figure out Middle East peace and de-escalating conflict with North Korea, if you remember 2017 with Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump and all that. He's involved in that stuff. And I tested that theory by him. I said, Do you really think like the presenting issue is the presenting issue? He goes, It never is. Very rarely, very rarely is it the presenting issue. And so the hope for pastors in the midst of this is dig a little deeper and you discover that the guy who wrote you in all caps is going through a really difficult time at home. I mean, maybe, maybe there's some financial problems, maybe his marriage is at the brink of dissolution, maybe his kids don't talk to him right now, or he's gonna lose his job. There's often pain under the issue, and and you know, he's definitely mad about politics, but politics is not the real issue. And the good news for pastors is if you come alongside empathetically people, you can just say, Well, what else is going on in your life? You know? Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that. Wow, okay. And you kind of pastor them, and and the presenting issue kind of de-escalates. Maybe it doesn't entirely go away, but it deflates. And so there was that. There was also, if you're going to preach, what do you preach about? I would suggest you preach about the issues under the issue, uh, identity. You know, we've been uprooted as a culture uh in terms of our identity, as fewer and fewer people profess any kind of faith, let alone faith in Christ. Your identity created by God is certain seeking to attach to something. So it's success or it's money or it's politics or it's ideology. I am what I believe. And so, okay, well, do a series on identity then, and talk about our real identity isn't red or blue. It's not independent, it's not who's in the White House or the governor's seat, it's it's actually in Christ. And what does it mean to be rooted in Christ? So we got into stuff like that, and I thought, you know, it's not like here are three steps to have total peace in your, it's not that, but I think it's an exploration over multiple hours of the issues under the issues, and so that's why I went there and it helped me understand it a lot better too.
SPEAKER_03I was listening on uh a morning run. I guess you while we're filming this, you had just aired your first episode, and Andy Stanley was your guest. Very well done. It sort of hit on that. It dawned on me. Uh, you've been a pastor a long time. I was a pastor before I do it, I do. How many times, if you're listening today and you're a pastor, how many times has the couple come in that's fighting about something he did or something she said, and it is not about either one of those things?
SPEAKER_01Exactly. Exactly. It's it's true. The presenting issue is rarely the issue, and it happens in your home too, right? Like, who left uh who left the ketchup out on the counter? That's not about the ketchup being left out on the counter. Or, you know, that's that's about something else. You've got other issues going on in your family, and the same is true in the church. And you know, it was actually Andy who taught me that. I've I've known him for 20 years, is he's like, empathize with your opponents, just call him up. And I had somebody who was really mad at me because I had publicly profiled someone that he doesn't like. And um, he sent a thoughtful, measured email through the public account. My assistant forwarded it to me, and his number was there, so I just gave him a call. And we had a very measured conversation about it. I learned more about him, his church, his family. And, you know, I don't know that I changed his mind, but we're not enemies.
SPEAKER_03So well, I I wanted to test a theory I was thinking about. Um, and you've just done this series so you'd know, but I'm beginning to think you know, the issue beneath the issue is that that's like the thing beneath the thing, right? That Steve Gardner has out there. It's it's where everything is. But I get a little tone-deaf to what's really going on because uh I think I'm living in a world now where the news that is fed to me happens to reinforce what I already believe. Correct. The algorithm knows what you click on. And it will just try and inflame that. Uh where I think what I'm having to learn to do is read people I don't want to read. Read both of the newspapers that are extreme on both sides. Find a way to listen more to what I would you know call it the other side or what have you. And uh I was listening to David French talk, if you know David, um, and he said he he asked a person of one of the two parties, um what do you believe? Well, I believe this, this, and this. And do you believe that your party is tolerant? Well, absolutely we're tolerant. I, you know, we we tolerate everyone of every race and creed and kind and socioeconomic, the whole thing. And he said, Okay, so your opposing party, um, what are they like? Well, they're awful. And and he said, So what are you tolerating? If it's only things you agree with, you're not tolerating anything. Tolerating is to bear a load. And so I'm having to challenge myself. Like, how do I go bear a load without compromising? I don't know if that tapped into anything you've heard in your conversations, but is that am I off baseless? Already did.
SPEAKER_01Another thing is we're out of practice in relationship. You know, the good news about social media is you can learn anything anytime about anyone that you want to. The bad news is in real life, you look at any data point. I mean, the U.S. Surgeon General has declared loneliness and isolation epidemics in the United States. And you look at Gen Z, I mean, you see increasing anxiety around even phone calls and human relationships and conflict. And, you know, Jonathan Heights making important contributions in that field right now, trying to get us to have a little more adversity and a little higher tolerance for some of the challenges that we have. And so, you know, yeah, that's definitely an issue. And the good news is for church leaders who are listening, or if you're a lay leader invested in your church, nobody should be able to out-community the local church, right? Like we should be the people who are like, no, we're having face-to-face conversations. We're gonna meet in each other's homes during the week. We're gonna meet at this building on the weekend, we're gonna sit next to someone who isn't the same socioeconomic status that we are, doesn't live in the same neighborhood, isn't the same income level, uh, maybe votes a little bit differently, and we're gonna be in community because we're united by something that transcends all of this. So I think, you know, the good news for churches is yeah, right now we're kind of the problem, we're feeding the problem. But if we get off the script that the culture is feeding us, we're also the solution because the gospel has within it the actual solution to a lot of the problems that we're facing.
SPEAKER_03Oh, right down to the the yeah, I think we've talked about this before on a podcast, but I'm struck that so I so I learned from a number of people. Um look for the first place something is mentioned in scripture. That the the principle of the firsts. And so anytime you see something, when's the first time that happened? You go back to it. So what is the first thing God cursed?
SPEAKER_01Uh it was uh our oh, was it uh was it Eve got the first curse or Adam? You're testing my Genesis three knowledge. Princess would work, but I don't think that's it's uh it's a serpent.
SPEAKER_03It's not in Genesis three. It's not God said let there be light and light.
SPEAKER_01It's pretty clear.
SPEAKER_03That's all right. God God said let there be light and there was light and it was good. Benediction. And then he made whatever he made next. I don't know the order, plants or animals or stars. Actually, the second thing he did was he started a calendar, the sun and the moon. So he had a plan. Um, but that was good. And then the next thing is good a blessing, blessing, blessing. And he made man very good, right?
SPEAKER_02And then God turns around and says, It's not good that man be left alone.
SPEAKER_03He cursed us being in solitude or alone or antisocial, even. He cursed that before sin entered the world. Isn't that powerful? That is powerful. And I just I just think I you know, I noticed it years ago when we were all locked in our houses for the pandemic, but like the isolation that's happening through whether it's social media or just the way we're wired, that's that's the ultimate plan of the enemy, is to divide and isolate.
SPEAKER_01Uh and I'm a big fan of online church. I mean, I think it's great, but it's a substitute, it's a supplement, not a replacement for in-person community. And I think the church could lead the way there. We could still, we're the one organization because all the social clubs have basically dissolved. I mean, you go to a Koanis or a Rotary, and it's all a bunch of 75-year-old men who aren't going to be here in 15 years. And, you know, there's very few organizations that really draw an entire community together, but that is the Church on Mission. So I think that's a good one.
SPEAKER_03Well, that's the that's the uh Howard Schultz's fabulous podcast we were talking about before we aired called Acquired. If you have three and a half hours, I'm I do a little bit of long distance running, so it's a couple runs, and that'll do me. He was talking about, you know, the one thing that makes him so mad about his company right now is the way the uh the app has taken over ordering. Because he wanted Starbucks to be the third space, the gap right home of the third. And it Destroyed it. Like 40% of their orders are walk in, walk out, and it's and he can't stand it. We're turning. And I'm trying to ask myself, how do I get more in community and around people I don't agree with? And I I don't know, maybe I'm just wishy-washy, not wanting to take a side.
SPEAKER_01I remember one of the first times I was in Europe, I was speaking to church leaders, and it dawned on me that still in Europe, 10 years ago, the idea of a takeout coffee was foreign because it's not a drink, it's a conversation. You go, you sit down, you linger, you bring a friend, you bring your spouse, and you sit down and you have a cup of coffee together. Why would you ever want to bring that in your car? Nobody can get it. And European cars for years had small had fewer cup holders than American cars. American cars. I remember I had Toyota Sienna minivan, man. It had like 17 cup holders and space for seven passengers. That's right. Eight, eight, something like that. And like 17 cup holders. It's like, how much are we drinking? What is going on here?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, no cop, no cup holders, and the air conditioning stinks on all the cars from Europe because it's never warm there. In Houston, we need air conditioning. So a different podcast. I will say on this whole loneliness thing, I was reminded uh when I was listening to one of your podcasts that uh Gordon McDonald, George McDonald, not Gordon, uh, who was a bit of a mentor to C.S. Lewis, he wrote uh the line goes, I think it is, Hell is God's granting of our final wish to be left alone. And I thought, oh, that's what I gotta learn from that. So enough on politics, though. I I I would encourage anybody listening to go find that podcast series. We're gonna air this before the election so you can catch it mid-stream.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I'll be wrapping up in mid-September, I think.
SPEAKER_03Early, early, early September.
SPEAKER_01Six interviews, and then I do a solo episode.
SPEAKER_03Well, we'll make sure to put it in the show notes. Tuning in, and as I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, we've got a whole nother installment of this episode. I don't think you're gonna want to miss it. Carrie gets pretty honest with us about what he's seeing out there, and that guy's got a viewpoint that very few people can say they have. So tune in next week for the second installment of my conversation with my friend Kerry.
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, Vanderblumen.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.