Welcome to the Vanderblumen Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Krista Kneidek, Senior Marketing Coordinator here at Vanderblumen. In today's podcast, our executive search consultant Rick Callahan talks with Glenn Pacquiao, a senior pastor of Rock Harbor Church in Costa Mesa, California. Glenn is also an author of several books, including The Resilient Pastor. In this conversation, Glenn gives Pastor's much needed energy for a new season of ministry and insight into Pastor's desire to be a faithful shepherd in the midst of a turbulent world. We hope you enjoy the conversation.
SPEAKER_01Well, welcome to the Vanderblumen podcast. I'm Rick Callahan, one of our consultants, and I have the privilege today to be joined by the Reverend Dr. Glenn Pacquiaum. He's probably cringing that I said it that way. He's part of the Anglican Communion. I'll let him talk a little bit about that. He's a senior fellow with the Barna um network. And he just recently stepped into a new role in Southern California at Rock Harbor. And so welcome, Glenn. Well, how are you doing?
SPEAKER_02Thanks, Rick. Great to talk to you today, man. Yeah, we're doing good. We're doing great. We're a couple weeks into this transition here, and uh, we're so grateful. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So tell us a little bit about what you're doing now.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So I get to serve as the lead pastor of a church in Costa Mesa, California called Rock Harbor Church. And I started at the beginning of September. In October, I'll have like an official commissioning service. So kind of the this whole month of September, I've been given the gift of having the time to uh really communicate with the staff and to sit down for these long one-on-ones with the team and find out um, you know, kind of their story, their passion, and yeah, how they feel about their roles. So uh I'm filling up my days with appointments with staff and elders and congregants, and it's a really, really wonderful, wonderful season.
SPEAKER_01That's great. What I'm curious, what have you learned about yourself? What have you learned about transitions that um wasn't really on your radar in the middle of all this? Because you were at New Life for two decades, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, 20, 22 years at New Life and in a variety of roles. You know, most recently, the last 10 years at New Life, I was the lead pastor of one of our congregations, New Life Downtown, uh, and then for the past five years had served as associate senior pastor was helping to oversee the congregations, uh, development for the pastors and staff churchwide. So I mean, I think what I've learned about myself is that there's um there's a there's a tendency that I have to maybe say everything that I see, that you come into a situation, you're assessing, you're learning, you're discerning. And I've learned that my notebook is my best friend because I'm writing down lots of notes, but recognizing that that you're kind of writing metaphorically speaking, you're writing in pencil. Um, because your your early observations may not be the actual uh accurate observations. And so so learning to go slower in in not saying what you see. Uh I'm also learning, Rick, that uh that I really like this warm weather here in Southern California.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it'll keep, won't it? It'll keep.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I've always found in the even the transitions I made in pastoral ministry, I to never make the assumption that it's going to be exactly like where I was before. Yeah. But everything that I had experienced, the Lord kind of allowed me to that I can bring to the table, but not necessarily to duplicate. And so it's really hard when you had success someplace to go, well, this is how we do it. And but it's a completely different context. That's right. When we move from a different city in the US, it's hard to think like missionaries when we probably should.
SPEAKER_02Well, it's what a gift you are to pastors who are making that transition, because you can I can feel that temptation of, well, let's just bring a playbook, but you can't, but I'm not doing that. Uh, and I know that that isn't right. And there is this sort of tension of, okay, if I'm called to this role, then there are certain sort of experiences and maybe even uh skills that have been honed or scars that have been earned or whatever that that are required for the task here, for the call here. And at the same time saying, but how might the Lord reshape that? How might the Lord pull on some of those same threads uh but weave a different tapestry, if you will, in in this context?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's great. We're praying for you, man. I'm really excited that you're there. I know we as a team at Banner Bloom are excited that you landed there and prayed for wisdom as you kind of weave that new tapestry because I found people who've been places a long time. Um, it was an art to introducing change. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I'm really excited to talk to you about a new project that you're a part of that got released earlier this summer called The Resilient Pastor. I'll hold that up for us here. And um, it's a book that you did in conjunction with Barna, the Barna group. And I'd love to just hear about how this project came about.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah, it's great, Rick. I mean, I'm so grateful for the partnership with Barna and how it began was February of 2020. I had uh some a coffee with David Kinneman, the president of Barna. He was coming through town in Colorado and wanted to get some time together. And he presented this idea and said, Hey, I'd like to partner with you to write a book about the challenges that our fate, you know, pastors are facing in kind of a changing world. And I had, you know, at that time was two years removed from finishing my doctoral work in the UK, which was a research approach that blended, you know, situational analysis using some good qualitative research tools with it, it blended that with theological reflection. So I kind of got excited at the idea. I said, man, David, let's run. And I started outlining these eight challenges, four for the pastor and four for the church. And then lo and behold, the pandemic broke out, you know, a month later. And I thought maybe the Lord tricked me into saying yes to this because I certainly would have felt not up to the task uh, you know, had I known. Um, but I'm I'm so grateful for the amazing uh Barna team. And so in the fall in uh of 2020 and even in the spring of 2021, I worked with their team to kind of design some questions surveys that went out to uh hundreds of pastors that they sent out, and I got to work on kind of crafting or assisting in crafting some of those questions. And then I did focus groups of my own, Rick. I I um I put the word out there on social media and had three different sets of focus groups, about uh eight or nine pastors in each one from the US, from Canada, from the UK, and spent about 90 minutes kind of talking through some of the challenges with them. And so again, four that are facing the pastor, four that are that are facing kind of the church at large. Um, and so then the book released in February of this year. And because of some of the data that Barna has discovered, especially over the last couple of years, of the high, the rising rates of pastors who are seriously considering quitting full-time ministry. Uh, it it was 29% in January of 2021, it was uh 38% in October of 2021, and it's it's risen to 42 or 43% in March or April of this year. And so, because of that, sort of if nothing else, it's an indicator, maybe it's a warning light that there's uh discouragement and strain. Uh Barna and I, we decided to actually make this more than a book and to launch a whole um array of initiatives. So we we've started the Resilient Pastor podcast. Uh, we're doing the Resilient Pastor City Roundtables, which we've done um three already, two in the spring, one uh this month. We'll we'll do six in the fall total. In different cities, it'll be free thanks to sponsors. And then we've just launched the Resilient Pastor cohort, which is the six-month journey. 150 pastors or so are part of it. So, just you know, like so many of you, like you guys at Vanderblum, and like so many other ministries and organizations, trying to find ways to encourage and equip pastors for this particular moment.
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SPEAKER_01Yeah, I so appreciate that. I mean, my sense, I was actually in local church ministry during the pandemic before I joined Vanderblumen. And the sense that I had was the pandemic didn't necessarily cause this, but it probably accelerated a whole bunch of things that surfaced. And there are a lot of us who were like, I don't think I want to do this anymore.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01For a variety of reasons. What were some of the reasons that you saw in the research that were pastors are like, I think I might tap out?
SPEAKER_02Well, even when we were doing the early stages of the research for the book in 2020 and 2021, it was the divisions, it was political tensions, it was the unrealistic kind of stacking expectations of the job. And when I when I unpack that for people and I start to name it, you know, like maybe it decades ago, the expectation was the pastor was the Bible answer person, you know, or maybe the resident theologian, or they handled the sacraments. But then you sort of add to that, no, they're supposed to be really an expert therapist, and they're supposed to be able to rescue your marriage or help you reach your teenager who won't talk to you. And then it was, no, no, no, the pastor is a CEO or an entrepreneur, and they're supposed to be amazing at organizational leadership. And then more recently, it's it's the pastor's supposed to be a political commentator or a social activist, and they're supposed to parse out the very complicated history of power dynamics or social uh pain. And it's not as if, Rick, it's not as if these expectations have just substituted one another, where we've switched from one paradigm of a pastor to another. I actually think these have sort of compounded, it's like compound interest, you know, they've just sort of stacked on top of each other to where a pastor feels like no matter what I do, I can't get up to zero. I can't get up to level ground because I'm I'm I'm already behind in people's expectations. And then I think that you add in the extra layer of the digital age that we're living in. And you're right about the pandemic. It didn't, there were not many things that the pandemic was the instigator of, but it may have been the accelerator or maybe the revealer of. And what in one of those ways, when we were all sitting at home watching online church, or maybe at least we did for the first month or two, and then the numbers, the data really, you know, plummets. Um, I think people figured out, man, if I'm watching a church on YouTube, I can pick which church I'm watching. And so then the comparison game just sort of turned up the dial on that, you know, where it was like, well, wait a minute, my pastor's not talking about race or about politics or about justice. And and so then you take this already impossible sort of stacking expectations and you add in the social media dynamic where we feel like we're in everybody's backyard, uh, looking over the fence. And it just sort of felt like the local pastor was couldn't couldn't keep up.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's a lot. It's and it I as I read the book, I went, okay, you're putting words to what I was sensing. Like, and I think a lot of pastors say it's like something's off. And I think you do such a great job identifying, okay, here's what the data shows is off. Um, so in that data, obviously there are some alarming things. Anything that surprised you?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Um I that there were some encouraging signs about, so let me name some of the challenges. The four challenges facing the pastor that I outlined were the challenge of vocation, like what are we, you know, the sense of confidence in our calling. Surprising in a negative way is that fewer pastors are more confident in their calling today than when they first started. So it used to be when we did when Varna did this, the asked this question five years earlier. Um, you know, pastors tended to grow in the confidence in their calling. At least that that percentage of pastors who felt more confident was a larger percentage. Now it's fewer. So fewer pastors have more confidence. And then, you know, in a parallel way, more pastors have less confidence. So there's a shakiness to our calling. The second challenge is about our life with God. This one was sort of encouraging. I think pastors do have learned that, hey, it's important that I prioritize my life with God. And so uh they would, you know, pastors do have these regular rhythms of a day alone with God or other prayer practices. So that seems to be okay. I wouldn't say it's excellent, but it's not in dire straits. The third one was the challenge of relationships. And Rick, I'll I'll say this was another one of those, oh, hang on a minute, where pastors would say, Yeah, I've got people in my life, and yet uh maybe they don't have the right people, or maybe they don't have the right amount of frequency of contact with those people because um a significant percentage of pastors report feeling lonely and and isolated.
SPEAKER_01I encounter that in our day-to-day work. Um, we had a meeting today, even where we were talking about as consultants, I you know, I'm brought in for a specific task, but what I find happening more and more these days, and actually where I could get to tap back into my own pastoral roots, is being a companion and even a pastor to pastors, yeah, where they can talk about things without a filter.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And um, it's amazing just to watch the weight that gets lifted when they feel like somebody heard them and gets that.
SPEAKER_02That's right. Yeah. Well, and and what a blessing to have you and to have the team at Vanderbloemen Rick, because uh, for so many of the pastors, including the ones in my focus groups, it they struggled to find someone that was safe, someone that they could talk to outside the realm of the church. And in the book, I kind of outline five different types of relationships that we ought to have. I mean, it's great to have a really close friend, a confidant, a peer, or a friend. It's great to have peers like other pastors that you can compare notes to. That's why pastors join cohorts and go to conferences. But also, we also need a sage type of voice, someone who's been there. I mean, think of Lord of the Rings, you know, we're uh, you know, a Gandalf type of figure, someone who shows up at key moments in your journey that you can just kind of say everything to, and they'll say, Yeah, okay, hang on. And then maybe another voice that's sort of missing for pastors is the voice of a therapist or a counselor, the voice of a healer, you know. Um, and so so there is a gift for that, but I will say that pastors struggle in identifying who those people are.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we're we're so used to having to be the one that has the answers. I've encountered lots of times we're like, no, I serve people. I don't need to be served when that's just death.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01So it's just death. So what those were, I think, three things that were with pastors. What's the fourth?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the fourth challenge facing pastors is the challenge of credibility. And this one has the most sort of alarm bells uh to me. Uh, not in a, oh my gosh, let's get back to how things were, but just to recognize the nature of the changing world, there's a declining sense of credibility. And so uh among non-Christians, you know, the question was posed um, do you consider a pastor a trustworthy voice of wisdom? And between the 4% who said yes absolutely and the 18% who said yes somewhat, that's still a meager 22%. And maybe you say, well, we kind of expect that. I mean, look at general attitudes of non-Christians toward pastors. But what was maybe more concerning was the percentage of Christians. So about 71% of Christians said yes absolutely or yes somewhat that a pastor is a trustworthy source of wisdom, which means about a third of Christians are saying, yeah, no, not really, or no. Um, and and when I when I share this, you know, in some of these live events we're doing with the resilient pastor stuff, um, pastors will chuckle around the room because they they resonate with this. That's like, yeah, about a third of the people in your church on any given weekends kind of listening to you and saying, Yeah, I don't know. You know, pastors chuckle because they're like, Yep, I get those emails or I can see those looks from people.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I remember times feeling like, oh, I feel like they've now got lumped into the group with politicians and referees and head coaches. Everyone thinks they know how to do my job better. Right. And they have their invisible scorecards that are hanging, they're holding up.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01It's very visible in the form of an email.
SPEAKER_02Yes, exactly. And then I think what's what's hard, and maybe there's some of this in the chapter, I kind of say, look, the way out of this is not to kind of do it, launch a PR campaign and reclaim credibility. We we have to do the right thing for the right reasons. That's one of the phrases we said at New Life for a lot of years, do the right thing for the right reasons for a really long time. And you got to do that, whether or not it results in a in a restoration of credibility. Um, but I think it's we've not been helped by the broad brush sort of media conversations about evangelicals or evangelicals in politics. And so, you know, I've talked to a lot of pastors, and I certainly have experienced this where I'm sitting for over, you know, for a coffee with a young person at 20-something, and they're like, Yeah, I haven't given up on Jesus. And I like you guys as a church, but I'm just not sure how I feel about being associated with the church or the evangelical church in in today's uh world. And so there is a little bit of, it's not guilt by association, but it's sort of this loss of credibility by implication. And again, maybe some of that's like, let's take our medicine that we we, you know, we we deserve some of that. Uh, and so I I've said to pastors where there are moments that we can take the posture of being low and saying, I'm so sorry for the ways that Christians in Jesus' name, you know, have used the Lord's name in vain. Uh, those are good, those are good things that we can do.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's good. And then you alluded to obviously, as a pastor with the credibility gap, that it's a suspicion of the church. And so I know your next section has to do with challenges for the church. What might those be?
SPEAKER_02So the four that we chose to focus on are the challenge of worship, meaning why do we gather and and do we, you know, is it even important? And I think every pastor in America right now is saying, yeah, no kidding. I'm trying to do a teaching series or whatever this fall to help people recognize uh why the gathering is not everything, but it is important. It is a significant thing. Um, so that that chapter in the book deals with that. There's some data there about why people are drawn to a gathering.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I found that was a very, very insightful chapter. One of the metaphors I've found that's been helpful in this season was I would say to folks, hey, let's let's stop thinking of our weekend gathering as the Super Bowl instead of you know, why don't we look at it as halftime? I mean, I'm really into sports. I know you and your kids play soccer. And I'm like, halftime is really important. Yeah. You get recalibrated, you get refreshed, there's sometimes really good snacks, you know, um, good music if you're at a I'm going to Notre Dame game this weekend. So all those kinds of things, they're important, but that's not, it's also that we can then get back into the game.
SPEAKER_02That's right.
SPEAKER_01Let's let's right-size our expectations here.
SPEAKER_02That's so good. Yeah, I I I have found it helpful, and I'm doing this here with the team at Rock Harbor where we talk about these three words encounter, formation, and mission. Uh, as it relates to the gathering, even. So we gather to an encounter. There is an expectation of meeting with God. And by the way, that is the number one reason people named when they said, I'm coming to church, that's with an expectation to meet with God. But secondly, it is about formation. So we are trying to wrestle with their questions that they're coming in with. They're not they're not here for sort of a cheap show. They could, they could find that better elsewhere. They want to really know that the the issues and the fears and the longings and the questions that they have will be addressed in some way. But then, like you said, mission, we we we gather not for the sake of ourselves, but so that we can be sent back into the world. So that's challenge one. Um, and then the other three are the challenge of formation itself. So, how do we make disciples and and in an in an age where there's the counterformational voices from culture, from media, social media, uh, TikTok for crying out loud, you know, is so is so obnoxious in our faces. How does the church sort of um invite people into an alternative way? And then thirdly, the challenge of mission. What really is our mission in the world? I mean, Rick, it was discouraging uh to see people take a narrow view of that on either side, to say, no, it's only activism or justice, or it's only just preach the gospel, which was reduced to, you know, conversion sermons, altar call sort of moments. Uh, and how do we reclaim the large, expansive sort of kingdom mission that Jesus had in the gospels? And then fourthly, the challenge of unity. I mean, that's that's maybe one of the things we're all feeling pretty acutely in the American church, especially, is this the necessary disciplinary, corrective work, and yet you're my sister, you're my brother. For our baptism has to be stronger, it has to be a stronger factor than our political allegiances or whatever else.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I it's such a challenge. I I know every time I've been in a developing world for an extended period of time working with churches, that's one of the things that's palpable to me is the absence of that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And when I talk with them about that, they're like, we don't have the luxury.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Not be unified.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah. Well, and Rick, you and I have both spent some time in the UK, you more than I maybe, but but you you recognize that you know, I've I've seen this in my friends over there. It's like division is a luxury of a church in power, you know. But but as faithful Christians become fewer and fewer, we don't have the luxury of sort of sticking with our tribes here. Like we we not only do we need the gifts of one another, um, this isn't this isn't the way to faithfully steward the faith in this in our generation um by by reducing it to fewer and fewer um tribes.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
unknownSo
SPEAKER_01So challenges are clear. Anything that left off the page that you'd say is encouraging.
SPEAKER_02I mean, I think my reason for hope is you alluded to this, is the global church. I mean, there's I would say in two directions, the historic church and the global church. So reasons for hope are not necessarily found in the data. They're found in the story, they're found in the narrative, they're found in the thing that we're part of. I uh it really grated on me when people kept saying we're in unprecedented territory, we've never been here, we've got to reinvent everything. And I get it. Look, I'm I'm not one for sort of digging in our heels and trying to cling to old ways just because they're old ways. At the same time, it depends how old are we talking? Are we talking like 1990s strategies? Or are we talking like the 390s? You know, like are we talking hundreds big because there's some there's something about the witness of the church that has been through schisms and the Donatus controversy and other pandemics and persecutions that we can say, hang on a minute, what can we learn from the church in Carthage, for example? And so the book, you know, the book has insight into the our current context, but it has wisdom from the ancient church, you know, from the historic church. Uh, and and then of course the global church, which you've alluded to, is to say, okay, okay, this might be a shift for us in the West, but actually that the church in the global south, they've been living on the margins for a while now. And how uh have they found hope and courage? And what can we learn uh from them in those ways? So, so there's the the historic church, the global church, and then maybe a third uh sign of hope here, Rick, is the the collaborative church. Um there's a very real sense in which the the places where you see life emerging, even here in the West, are where we're bleeding in streams. You and I were talking about how you uh, you know, the charismatic and the liturgical and the, you know, so so that's a convergence of streams that I think is a it's a kind of collaboration. It's a collaboration that looks like gleaning from the gifts of different streams and traditions. But also in a smaller level, during the pandemic, many cities and many churches in those cities had stories of collaborating together for food bank, food drives, um, for you know, visits to care facilities and correctional facilities. So that kind of breaking down the walls, even on a micro level of our own local communities, those are signs of hope to me.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's great. I know you even allude to that in your third, your third section, you have a whole chapter on the collaborative church. And it even in the midst of this, with the work that we do, um, I often remind, you know, search teams or elder teens or pastors when they're getting anxious, and that's all part of the journey for all of us, is just not letting the anxiety rule the day. Yeah. Like I just want to remind you of something that you already know is that at no point in this equation is the father going, yeah, I got nothing.
SPEAKER_02That's good.
SPEAKER_01You know, which I think leads to your your final chapter um about hope. So what I found that super encouraging. What would you kind of elaborate on um future there?
SPEAKER_02I love that that you say that to pastors because we we do get kind of myopia. We get a small tunnel vision here of our situation and our crisis. And the resurrected Jesus is always lifting our heads to a longer timeline than we might imagine. You know, so 1 Corinthians 15, Paul says, look, if Jesus hasn't been raised from the dead, our preaching is in vain, our faith is in vain, everything's in vain. But then he goes through this whole long section of why Jesus actually has been raised from the dead, and one day he's gonna return and reign and conquer death and we'll be raised from the dead. And, you know, so there's our future resurrection. And then after all of that, he says, so now be steadfast and immovable, uh, excelling in your work for the Lord, knowing that your labor in the Lord will not be in vain. And so there it is, our faith, our preaching, our labor will not be in vain. Why? Because Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. And that reminds me of that great quote from uh the British missionary Leslie Nubigan. You know, I'm neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. And so I think that does a number of things. I think one, it says to us as pastors, there's no situation that is too far gone. There's no circumstance in which you can say, oh no, the worst thing imaginable has happened. You know, we serve the God who raises the dead. And so that's our reason for hope even today. But it also has this kind of dual horizon. There's a further horizon of hope, which is to say we won't even know the impact of our ministry until the other side of our resurrection. One day we're gonna see that. So we need to take not the five-year view or the 10-year view. We need like the thousand-year view uh that says we're all gonna be intraim pastors and we're all interim pastors, we're all sort of stewarding the moment and these churches. And one day on the other side of the resurrection, uh, we'll know how our labor has really not been in vain.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I always want to be reminded that this is his church, it's not mine. And um, and it's the spirit, it's power that is at work, it's Jesus who builds his church. And ultimately, all I'm called to do is follow him and walk with him, you know, in sync. And if we do that, that's the best news in the world that God is with us.
SPEAKER_02Exactly.
SPEAKER_01Amen. The king is with us. I mean, that's the good news, right? Jesus is king, let's live like that.
SPEAKER_02Yes, yes, and you know, and you said it, he's with us. You know, he's with us through the power of the Holy Spirit. This is the book ends with the you know, chapter the chapter is called The Presence and the Power. Um, to recognize, man, the greatest um reason for confidence, the reason we can wake up every morning is not because we've cracked the code on a discipleship program. Lord knows we haven't. Um, but the Holy Spirit is at work in his church, and Jesus is the head of the church. John Wesley, his final words on his deathbed to his you know, band of uh, you know, not followers, but the guys that were with him on the journey, his final words were, and best of all, God is with us. Uh and that's what that's what we have to keep reminding ourselves of.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we need to continually remind each other. Well, this has been great to connect with you, Glenn. I know as you're getting started in a new season, you've got a lot on your plate. So to take some time out to visit today, I really, really appreciate it. I think this will be a gift to folks who are able to tune in. Um, remind us again how they can tune into what you are offering for pastors who want to get um reinvigorated and stay in the game here.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the best way for pastors to keep up with all of the efforts, initiatives, resources we're creating, many of which are free, are uh is theresilientpastor.com. The resilient pastor.com. And there's a link to the podcast, which is free, of course, the city round tables, which are free. Uh the cohort's already going, so there's nothing there uh in in terms of it's it, you know, joining in with the um with the fee and all of that. So everything else is is up there. Uh, and we just we just want to come alongside one another and see the Holy Spirit bring his work in us.
SPEAKER_01That's great. Can I ask you to do one more thing, which is just pray a blessing over those who tune in?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah, I'd love to. Rick, thank you for your work. Thank you for this effort here. And uh, let me just pray over everyone who's listening. Father, we're so grateful to you for who you are. We're grateful for your faithfulness to us. Jesus, you are alive, you reign. Uh, and I thank you that you're at work in the world by the Spirit. And so, Holy Spirit, I'm I'm asking you now, come and renew your work in our hearts. For everyone who's listening, wherever we're listening from, our cars, our uh maybe airplanes, or while they're walking or going on a run. I just pray that you would help us to pause even in this moment and just receive the renewing work of the Holy Spirit. Keep our love for Jesus burning brightly, keep our hearts soft and tender, keep our minds engaged and meditating on the word of the Lord, keep our relationships strong if we're married, keep our marriages strong and our families, uh friendships. Lord, I pray that you would help us to return to our first love, to uh reorient the relationships in our lives and to remind ourselves of the hope that we have in you. We pray these things in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Amen.
SPEAKER_01Amen. Thanks. Have a great day, guys.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for listening to the Vanderblumen Leadership Podcast. At Vanderblumen, we help Christian organizations build their best teams through hiring, succession, compensation, and diversity consulting services. Visit our website at Vanderblumen.com to learn more and subscribe to our Vanderblumen Leadership Podcast wherever you like the podcast to keep up with our newest episode. Thanks for listening.