The Church Residency Podcast
The Church Residency Podcast explores how local churches are training the next generation of pastors, church planters, missionaries, and ministry leaders through residency programs.
Hosted by Mark Warnock, Residency Director at Family Church in South Florida, each episode features conversations with leaders from churches across the country who are building intentional pathways for leadership development. Learn how residency programs are designed, funded, and implemented, hear lessons learned from both successes and failures, and discover practical strategies for developing leaders through hands-on ministry experience.
Whether you're leading an established residency, considering starting one, or simply passionate about raising up future leaders in the local church, this podcast will equip and encourage you to invest in leadership development within the life of the church.
The Church Residency Podcast
Ep. 2 - Leadership Development Starts with a Clear Vision
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Leadership Development Starts with a Clear Vision
Join us for an inspiring conversation with Gus Hernandez Jr., executive pastor at Reality Church Miami, as he shares how his church is developing leaders and multiplying ministries within a vibrant, multi-ethnic context. From internships to church planting residencies, Gus reveals practical strategies for leadership development that fuels church growth.
In this episode:
- Gus’s journey from the first believer in his family to church planter and leader developer
- How Reality Church Miami started and scaled within four years
- The church’s intentional leadership pipeline: summer internships, apprenticeships, and a church planting residency
- Curriculum insights: spiritual formation, gospel fluency, cultural diversity, and leadership skills
- The importance of proximity and relational investment in leadership development
- How leadership growth directly correlates with church growth and outreach
- Practical tips for starting and scaling residency programs in other churches
- Lessons learned about fostering humility, hunger, and emotional intelligence in future leaders
- Creative funding strategies and raising up leaders from within your congregation
- Future plans: church planting residency and supporting autonomous church launches
Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction: Leadership development in a growing church context
02:26 - Gus’s background and call to ministry
04:30 - How Gus’s early discipleship shaped his leadership approach
07:14 - Developing leaders through internships and apprenticeships at Reality Church
09:51 - Curriculum overview: spiritual, theological, cultural, and leadership training
12:38 - Favorite books and resources for leadership growth
15:31 - Financial support: stipends, fundraising, and partnerships
17:24 - Attracting college students and outside recruits into residency programs
19:07 - The objective of cultivating future church planters and missionaries
22:05 - Key lessons in leadership development: beginning with the end in mind and relational proximity
23:04 - Navigating challenges in scaling relational leadership models
25:30 - The power of prayer and resourcefulness in church planting and leadership training
26:47 - Developing a church planning residency: process, vision, and future steps
29:39 - Advice for pastors starting leadership residencies: embrace imperfection and focus on multiplication
32:47 - Success stories: from summer interns to growing church leaders
35:53 - The link between leadership development and church growth
36:42 - Lessons from Gus’s leadership journey and the importance of intentionality
40:23 - Final thoughts: what leaders should know when launching residency programs
43:33 - Connecting with Gus: how to get involved or reach out
Resources & Links:
Connect with Gus Hernandez Jr.:
Additional Notes:
Gus emphasizes the importance of starting small, building relationally, and staying flexible. His focus on internal leadership cultivation, resourcefulness, and real-world ministry experience provides a robust model for any church committed to multiplication.
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Always before you design this process, begin with the end in mind. Leadership development requires a destination and direction. You gotta first know the destination you're trying to take this leader. What kind of leader you wanted to see produced through your apprenticeship or residency. Gain that clarity on the front end. And then also wrestle with your why. Why do you want to develop leaders? Build that theological, biblical foundation, that conviction of why this matters.
SPEAKER_00Welcome to the Church Residency Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Hornock. I'm residency director at Family Church in West Palm Beach. And today I have the great privilege of talking with a really good friend, Gus Hernandez, who's just a little bit down I-95 from me at Reality Church down in Miami. Gus, thanks for being with us today and for having this conversation.
SPEAKER_01Man, absolutely. Mark, thanks so much for the invitation. Love and respect you a lot, my brother. And so can't wait for our time together. Welcome to Let's start.
SPEAKER_00Introduce yourself. Um talk a little bit about your family, how you got into ministry and what you're doing now. Give give us a kind of a frame up so we know who we're talking to.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, man. So Gus Hernandez Jr. married to my wife Barbie. It's going to be 19 years. Uh we have two precious daughters, uh, a 13-year-old and a 10-year-old. So just entered those teenage years. Uh, prayers up for your boy. Uh, nah, seriously. They've been, those girls are amazing. I I love being a girl dad, and it's been a fun season. Yeah, for me, as far as how I got into ministry, welcome to the school starts all the way back. I was the first Christian in my family. And so my parents as kind of like non-believers, welcome to placed me in a private school that happened to be a Christian school. And going through middle school, I had to own a Bible, read the Bible, and then just going through the book of Romans in Bible class, started to sense that conviction. And then my Bible teacher Marcus Rodriguez kind of helped fill in some gaps and explain the gospel more intentionally with me. And then I received my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and came home, started telling my parents about it over time. Got to leave my mom to faith. Welcome to see my dad come to faith. And man, the gospel just transformed my life and my whole family. Um, my senior year of high school is when I started sensing and wrestling with that call to ministry. And so then I enrolled in a Christian university, got a pastoral studies degree, went to seminary, and that that eventually got me started with some different internships at different churches that landed me my first um official ministry job right out of seminary. Yeah.
unknownWelcome.
SPEAKER_00You've been doing uh leadership development in different places in different ways, and you've thought really deeply about discipleship process and systems like that. Um, tell us some of like how you kind of got into that space and you know, um some of the story behind that.
SPEAKER_01Welcome to I I would say my love for discipleship and disciple making started in college. Um, as I mentioned, being the first believer in my family, kind of grew up um not really having a ton of spiritual mentors and leaders, and no one that was really teaching me intentional discipleship until my freshman year of college. I met uh a professor named Doug Hodges, who was a missionary to the Dominican Republic. He was stateside for a season. Welcome to while his wife was receiving treatments for cancer. And so he was teaching missions at this Christian college I attended, and he started to just teach me discipleship. He started mentoring me and discipling me personally, and for two years he just poured into me. Incredible relationship. I still uh keep in contact with Doug. He's one of those, you know, just spiritual leaders that shaped me in a massive way. And uh in 2003, his wife had been cured of cancer. They decided to go back to the mission field, and so he's giving me this update. I'm I'm at this point a sophomore in college. Uh, I'm just devastated at hearing the news that my mentor is leaving the college campus, but I'm excited at the same time because it's going back to the mission field. And then he extends this invitation. He's like, Hey, why don't you pray about taking a summer and why don't you come to the Dominican Republic and help us plant this church? Now I'm like 20 years old. I'm like, wow. All I gotta do now is convince my Cuban mama to let me leave the country and go to a place I'd never been before. And crazy enough, she did. She said, Fine, the Lord's calling you to do this and you raise the money needed. So I lived for 12 weeks in the Dominican in an apartment next to my mentor and his wife, uh, along with a couple other college students, and he just intentionally poured into us and taught us missionary life work, and then we went out and did it. Like every day we'd have training, then we'd go out and we'd spend time meeting people, connecting with people, starting groups, sharing the gospel, discipling Dominicans, and then by the end of the summer we launched the church. And I've been back to visit that church several times, got a mission team from my church, but Miami's going to that church actually in a month.
SPEAKER_00So Okay, let's go, man.
SPEAKER_01Beautiful. That church is 23 years old now, and they've planted other churches in the Dominican Republic. They've got a little training residency going at that church as well. So I would say my love for discipleship and my love for developing young leaders was birthed right there in college, and then my first summer experience overseas is that's great.
SPEAKER_00Um, the thing that I'm that is standing out, I've heard you tell this story before. The thing that's standing out to me now is your mentor is doing two things at the same time, right? He's doing the ministry in the DR and he's developing leaders while he's doing it. And uh gosh, I think in local church ministry, we have to be doing two things at the same time. Because Jesus did two things at the same time, Paul did two things at the same time. We we we've got to do it too. Um that that makes total, total sense to me. His his awesome. Well, um, so you're at uh reality church in Miami right now, uh executive pastor. That means you're in charge of everything, right?
SPEAKER_01His man, you know, it is those church planting vibes. Carlos Carlos uh Lulette, he's the he's the lead pastor. I serve as XP, and so man, we partnered together to co-plant this church. Uh great relationship. Uh, love Carlos, he's amazing. And so what I kind of do is I I try to run point on the disciple making and then the leadership development side of our church, in addition to like the finances. And then Carlos is you know primarily helping with the elder formation, right? You know, I preach once a month. He's preaching the other three Sundays a month. He's helping curate everything with the worship environment in alongside of our pastor uh Jordan, uh, who's our worship pastor, and uh really just helping us with that pastoral care outreach and some of those things. So we we kind of divided up the areas based on our gift mix and our strengths, but then we're always like collaborating and working through stuff together. So it's it's been fun.
SPEAKER_00I guess reality is how old now? Uh we just celebrated four years. Four years, okay. Yeah. Um great. Uh just to kind of frame this up for people, because I'm having conversations with residency leaders in lots of different kinds of contexts, and some of them are like newer and smaller, and some of them um are larger. Um, just to kind of frame it up for listeners, on a typical Sunday morning, how many people come to reality church?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we're we're ranging 350 to 400 right now.
SPEAKER_00Oh, that's great. That's great for a four-year-old church. That's outstanding. Okay, awesome. Um all right, so talk to me about what reality is doing to develop leaders. Um his his yeah, I'll just leave it there.
SPEAKER_01His man, early on, because that was a big part of what I was doing at my previous church. So before coming to plant at reality church, I was serving at a church in the Nashville area called Longhollow. And so I was overseeing uh spiritual formation and mobilization. And I've always had a heart for developing leaders. So as soon as we got here, we're always thinking, all right, even though we're a brand new church, what's gonna be our leadership pipeline? How are we gonna help call people up and develop them and walk alongside them? So we started our first summer as a church plant with a summer internship that flowed into a second summer, and once we had some interest and we saw some potential leaders starting to emerge from our congregation, we formalized it and started a one-year apprenticeship with an option to add year two. And so we started with two ministry apprentices and then it became six ministry apprentices. So right now we have six ministry apprentices going through what we call our Mac for short, our ministry apprentice cohort. And so they will commit for a year with the option to roll into a year two, and it's uh it's fun. There's two ways to structure it. I've got some of them are part-time, so they're either still wrapping up college or college students, or they're young professionals and have a job in the community, so they can do it part-time, or if they want to commit to full-time, we structure it a little bit differently. So it just depends if you want to do 15 hours a week or 30 hours plus a week. And so we just have different on-ramps and paths for those options. Okay.
SPEAKER_00Um, what's uh what's kind of the end in mind that you have for these leaders that you're developing? You know, some residencies like like are wanting to develop church planners and launch them out. Tell us about yours.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think for us, you know, we're trying to prepare young people for a significance of lifetime in ministry. And so I want to teach them how to lead themselves, I want to teach them how to lead others. Ultimately, I'm trying to equip them to be able to lead ministry. And so, if for me, if if that means in the future then becoming a church planter, pastor, or future missionary, I'm trying to lay that foundation that can open those opportunities and paths for them. And so the apprenticeship is really helping them wrestle with calling, teaching them some basic theology, some practical hands-on ministry skills. It's kind of a combination of spiritual formation, theological formation, um, and real hands-on ministry experience.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um let's double-click on that then. Talk a little bit more about what are some of the experiences you have, what are some of the topics that you tackle, give us a sense of what curriculum uh looks like.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So I think, you know, in our year-long process, we're gonna tackle uh components of spiritual formation. We move into gospel fluency. Um, from there, we move into disciple making skills, then we introduce missionary practices, um, then we move into a segment on theological formation. Uh, we do a segment on the multi-ethnic church, just understanding who we are as a multi-ethnic, multicultural church in the city of Miami. That's big to who we are. It's an expression of how we share the gospel in this community. So we want to overtly teach that and emphasize that. Uh, we move then into a leadership skills component, and then we end with emotional and relational health component.
SPEAKER_00That's great, man. Um, did you write all that material yourself? Are you just like cherry-picking books? Like, where did you come up with it? There, the reason I'm asking all these questions is when I talk to people who are starting residencies, a lot of times they immediately go to curriculum as like the big question that they're asking.
SPEAKER_01So yeah, what I always try to encourage people was like first like wrestle with how you were formed as a leader, and then try to think about how to principalize some of those things that shaped who you are, and then you're able to give that away so much easier. And so, what I try to do is first draw from like the books and the resources that had the most profound impact on my life. It's just natural and easy for me to take those principles and concepts and pass it on to another generation because I'm not having to go then read a new resource or like it's this book, I've already read it, it shaped me. The way I do this thing in ministry is because I was influenced by this mentor, this leader, or this book. So just take that and then organize it in a way that you can give it away to someone else. So I try not to overcomplicate it. It's just some of my favorite books that I've loved throughout the years. If I come across a new book that I read that I feel like covers a certain topic better than one of my old ones, then I'll replace it in the next years. That's kind of how I do it, is I'll update my curriculum. I also leverage a lot of executive summaries. Some books are not meant to be read, I think, like start to finish. Right. Sometimes like the sweet sauce or like that sweet spot in the book is like one to two chapters, or like this key thought that this author introduces. Sometimes you can get that thing in an executive summary. So I subscribe to a website called studyleadership.com and it professionally produces um executive summaries on some of these great books from ministry to leadership, different categories. Okay. And so now I can give an apprentice a 15-page PDF before a meeting. They're more likely to read that, get the main content I wanted out of that book. And then there's some books I do want them to read, like all the way through. So I kind of pick and choose between full books and executive summaries.
SPEAKER_00Um that's good. What what's uh what what's the your favorite book in your uh residency?
SPEAKER_01Oh man, that's that's tough. I would say I'm partial to um transforming discipleship by Greg Ogden, the second edition. I think that one because my mentor used that book to introduce me to personal disciple making that truly produces spiritual transformation. And that book has probably had the most profound impact on shaping of how I do ministry. It's birthed a lot of disciple making resources and things that I've done in the past. Yeah, but it all started with reading that book as a college student, and it's just formed and shaped how I do disciple make. So I'd have to say that one probably.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Um Gush, you also uh in your role with uh North American Mission Board, you're sort of like you're sitting in the the sort of like the residency seat of the church mobilization um team there, and you see a lot of other kinds of expressions of residency and leadership development and everything. Um tell me what what are some things that reality's doing that's really unique and distinct from maybe some of the others you've been exposed to?
SPEAKER_01That's a great question. I think something that I would say what we try to do is make it highly relational. I think one of the temptations can be, depending on the size church dynamics, there's a lot of different factors at play, is a residency can sometimes feel like this side project, this happening. And it's not getting a lot of the attention and focus of some of like the senior leadership of the church. And for us, it's a very much big part of who we are as pastors. Like we're wanting to spend time with the apprentices and the leaders that we're developing. We want to invite them into our rhythms and into the environments that we're doing ministry in. And so I would say we make it highly relational. So like proximity matters. I think the most effective residencies that I've seen and studied, there's always access to the pastors and leadership team as part of that journey of development. And it's one of the best ways to pass off that leadership DNA of those leaders and elders and pastors of the church. They're they're spending meaningful time developing other leaders. So I would say proximity and just the high relational nature of it.
SPEAKER_00No, that's great. That's great. So much of what we absorb in leadership is caught and not taught. You know, I think I think back to my early mentors, it's like it's not so much that I remember the things exactly that they told me, I just remember them and I remember how they were. And like you, you just it's it's imitation, you know. Uh, and I I think Jesus did this, you know. He's got his 12 guys just following him around, exposed to him, just sort of like soaking him up and seeing how he is and all of these different interactions. Um yeah, I think it's powerful, man. That's that's awesome. All right. Um, let's talk about uh let's talk about financials. Are your residents paid? Do you charge them tuition? Like like what how how do you handle that that side of it?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So, you know, we budget for in our church plant um to take care of all the costs of like the the training resources, you know, any meals that we do, like part of our cohort meetings, the the way it's structured is every two weeks it's dinner in our home. And so there's going to be a relational component centered around a meal, modeling biblical hospitality relationship, and then it shifts over into the intentional training teaching component. Um, but all of that's covered. We pay them a monthly stipend. And so where I was mentioning earlier, we have two tracks. If someone's wanting to do the 10 to 15 hours a week, then they'll get the monthly stipend and they either get a job in the city or they're still in school at the University of Miami. If they're doing the full-time track, we're doing a 75-25 split. So our church will give you a 25% stipend, and then you raise 75% of the salary you need to make it here in the city. So for us, you know, that's been averaging like $1,000 a month from the church. They're raising $3,000 a month. And so we help guide them through. We'll pay for their training in how to raise funds. Then we we leverage the MSc platform from NAM for fundraising and uh partnership support. And it's been great. And so right now we have six apprentices, four are doing that full-time approach, two are doing that part-time approach. So they chose to get a part-time job in the city and serve part-time at the church, and the other four are full-time.
SPEAKER_00Do you get these mostly uh from college students like University of Miami, Miami Dade? There are a lot of schools down there.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we're we're close to the University of Miami, and so we have you know roughly around 80 to 90 students from the University of Miami coming to our church plant. So it's just an extension of that leadership development, disciplemaking. If we start seeing, you know, certain gifts in certain young leaders and uh they start expressing a desire to want to be developed, we invite them into that ministry apprenticeship. And so, yeah, out of the six right now, five out of the six are from the University of Miami.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Where's number six from?
SPEAKER_01Nashville.
SPEAKER_00From our church. Okay.
SPEAKER_01So came down uh did a summer internship. Uh she's she's an incredible story. She first did a summer in Miami, came back, did a second summer, and then was convinced God was calling her to be part of our church planting team. And so we talked about what it looked like for her to move down and do a one-year apprenticeship, and it's turned into year two now. She's our year two resident or ministry apprentice. She's amazing. She's running our groups ministry and our our missions ministry at the church, which is phenomenal. Yeah. That's been fun to see her grow over the last three years from summer intern to year one apprentice to now year two apprentice. It's amazing.
SPEAKER_00That's cool. That's cool. Um is there uh is there any it it sounds to me like you're getting either college students who are connecting to a church or people you're recruiting from outside. Like, do you have a do you have a sense of objective or vision about where you want your students coming from? Do you want to have them emerge from your congregation or do you want to like bring them all in, or does it not matter to you? Like uh talk talk to me about it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I'm open to it. Like, I don't mind. Sometimes, you know, we have obviously a lot of mission, uh, a lot of partners that supported us as a church plant. So we have entertained some of those conversations with some of those supporting and sending churches that we have who want to send us some young adults that want to be trained. I would put them through that same process. My number one is always trying to raise leaders from within. And so I'm just constantly looking at my congregation with those, with those eyes of just like, man, who here has the potential to one day be a future pastor, missionary? Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_00What's the what's the application intake? Um, like how do you like get those folks in and committed? Talk to me a little bit about how you how you do that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think for us it starts with just that initial conversation and see kind of like how where they're at, if they're interested, they want to explore, they're sensing something. Sometimes it's an ICNU conversation. Maybe they're not seeing it quite yet, but all the all of us leaders around them, we see that potential in them. So I was like, hey man, I see in you the potential to one day be in ministry. Have you ever wrestled with that? Have you ever sensed God say something about that? And I just had one of those actually yesterday with a college student where I got him like see him speak somewhere. He just gave me like preacher vibes. Like, wow, it's such a good communicator. You explain that concept really well. And come to find out, he's like, Yeah, I've actually wrestled with preaching as a calling. I was like, Great, let's talk some more. And so from there, we have an application process. They fill out an application. Um, then we do the working genius from Patrick Lancioni as a self, you know, as an assessment. And then we'll we use the disc personality profile and predictive index as well. Um, then we set up interviews and they'll meet with a couple of the pastors. We try to get two pastors to do uh two separate interviews. We'll compare notes and then we feel like it's a good fit. We'll extend an invitation for them to be accepted into the apprenticeship. Okay.
SPEAKER_00So do you accept students like one time a year or is it a rolling thing? They can plug in lead.
SPEAKER_01We we have it structured to follow the calendar, academic calendar. So right now it'll go August to the end of May, and then we take like a month off in the summer before we kick it back off. And so it's following following that academic calendar.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that makes sense.
SPEAKER_01Unless they're staying through for two years and they're just staying through the summer. But we take a break from some of those cohort trainings and then they're just plugged into regular ministry rhythms. Okay. Awesome.
SPEAKER_00All right. Now uh let's get to the the real sauce. You've been doing ministry develop ministry leader development a lot of different ways, and you've um interacted with a lot of people who are doing this really high level all over the country. Um what are some of the what are some of the biggest lessons that you've either learned yourself or that you've seen in others uh about leadership development, but especially about doing it in a local church context?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think a few lessons that jump out at me. First, always before you design this process, begin with the end in mind. And so I have like this plumb line I live by that leadership development requires a destination and direction. So you got to first know the destination you're trying to take this leader. Like if you fast forward to the one year or two years of your process, what kind of leader are you wanting to see produced through your apprenticeship or residency? Like gain that clarity on the front end and then also wrestle with your why. Like, why do you want to develop leaders? Like build that theological biblical foundation, that conviction of why this matters, it'll help you persevere through the tough times because you and I know developing leaders is hard. And it's one of the easy things to just slowly get crowded out of your life with all the burdens of ministry. If you're not convinced that you have to do it and you don't believe the why, it's going to be easy to just cave on it. So I would say that's always a start. When I think about the residencies and the the processes that have worked well, I think the ones that I've I've realized are the ones that realize young adults learn best by doing. That's I see a temptation oftentimes is to deduce residencies, deduce apprenticeships into just like a seminary lecture that happens just once a week. Instructional training is a key part of it, and we have that built into our system, but it's not only that. So also providing real meaningful hands-on ministry, not like grunt work that's not meaningful, but they gotta know how to actually engage with people, how to own, and they gotta feel the weight of ministry placed on them while under your watch care and coaching, so you can start to stretch their capacity. So I would say is thinking about intentional ways to provide hands-on ministry experience. I would say number two is that proximity thing I mentioned earlier. I believe proximity matters that life on lifetime, that connection with the pastoral team, the ministry leaders. For us, all of our apprentices get assigned a staff mentor, and then they get assigned to a specific ministry in the church. So they're learning and serving under one of our ministry team leaders and pastors. That's just core to who we are. It's so important that we spend time developing these leaders, but also entrusting them with real responsibilities so they can start to feel and sense the weight of ministry. So I would say those are some lessons learned on the journey.
SPEAKER_00No, that's great. Um what's the biggest challenge you have right now?
SPEAKER_01You know, I would say because it's one of our strengths, but it can be one of our challenges, the high relational nature of our apprenticeship and our residency is also what could be one of those challenges as you keep scaling it, as you try to incorporate more leaders and you you start to develop more, you know, wanting to keep that relational touch, that connection, the mentoring, that proximity. That's going to be a challenge, but it's something that we're willing to navigate. And and Mark, I wouldn't be a church planner if I just say, you know, finding more resources. You know what I'm saying? Like four years into a church plan, one of the most expensive cities of Miami. I've had to just get creative with it. You know, I've applied for different grants and won different grants that have helped me just bolster my budget to be able to offer these stipends and buy the resources. I think what I've learned on that journey of the resources is one, God's heart is for multiplication and God's desires to see us as pastors and leaders raise up and develop more leaders. So God's going to provide. I have no doubt on that. He has been. Every year we keep trying to expand it, he fills the gap and keeps providing more. Um, and then what I've also realized is a lot of networks and leaders and individuals, they love seeing churches develop leaders. And so they get excited about that theme and topic. So as I approach people about partnering with us to help expand our apprenticeship, and even now we're launching our church planning residency, they're excited to do it. They're excited to give to it. So, you know, I would say it's a challenge, but it's one of those that God can prevent.
SPEAKER_00All right. So you mentioned you're you're developing a church planning residency. So you have ministry apprentices, right? I I always talk about the inverted funnel, right? And so, like your senior leaders, and I think a lot of people have uh a lot of residencies are like finishing schools for guys who are basically about there, maybe they seminary grad, they just need a couple reps before they launch out on their end. So it's sort of like the bottom of the funnel. Um but sounds like your apprentices sits about where our residency does, which is uh a little higher up, so a little more um early in the leadership development formative process. But you're gonna do this other piece. So talk talk a little bit about that and the plans you have for that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, man, we're excited about that. We're in the final stages now of bringing on our first church planting resident. So we're designing um it's gonna be a two-year process. Uh, first year is gonna be in-person residency, probably lasts a year, year and a half, and then it'll shift to the practical skills needed to go plant the church, living in context in the neighborhood, and then walk them through the church planting process. But yeah, so for us, seeing it more like the finishing school. So now you're not, it's the starting point, is what I always describe as the difference for people that are asking. I was like, with a ministry apprentice, your starting point is different. Usually it's gonna be a growing disciple, kind of showing some leadership giftings, still wrestling with like figuring out calling. So for us, it sits right like you described it perfectly, right in that middle spot of our leadership development process. For us, the church planting residency is not that, that's not their starting point. They've probably already got some ministry experience, and now they're really wrestling with, hey, I need the practical skills and knowledge to go plant a church in a specific neighborhood in Miami. But we want to help provide that. We want to teach them our system, our culture, we want to shape them, but ultimately we want to help come alongside and support them to plan a you know, multiplying church in the city of Miami. So we're excited. Yeah, our first church planting resident should start in the fall.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Now, is the vision for that resident to go plant a church that's independent of y'all, or like do you want it to be like a campus of reality, or like I know it no, that's a good question.
SPEAKER_01I'm talking to the guy that I should talk about this. We've entertained both options, like we would help him plant an autonomous church. We've also explored if at some point he wants to explore more of a family church model. That's something we're completely open to. And I think if that's the case, you know what you're gonna be hearing a lot from me because we'll have to figure out some more of those dynamics. But honestly, Carlos and I we just had a conversation about this yesterday, and we feel so good about this candidate. We would explore either option and feel great, but if it kind of depends on what the Lord's placing on this resident's heart and what he's envisioning in the church planting journey. So yeah, I think we're open to both options.
SPEAKER_00When it comes to church multiplication, you know, between like sending people out to be independent versus like there's all these different iterations and shapes of how multi-site can work. I just think there's not a right or wrong way to do it. There's, you know, you know, around here, like there's the right way, there's the wrong way, and there's the family church way, and like we're just you know, we're just figuring figuring it out.
SPEAKER_02Oh man.
SPEAKER_00I love what you guys are doing. Yeah, it's it's great fun, man. Um all right, uh let's see. Uh well one of the questions that I want to ask you, and I I may circle back to um to some other things, but um part of my heart in doing this and having these conversations with leaders like you is so that churches that don't have this kind of leadership development or they're thinking about it or you know, scared to kind of you know get started or nervous about it, um, is that they'll kind of be encouraged to to pull the trigger and go, you know, even you guys, like four years, like you started with just you just had some summer interns for a couple years and then you took it to the next level, and now you're taking it to the church plant. And so this is it's actually really good because you guys are four years old. You know, they say in the first five years, if you don't uh lean into the reproduction, you know, you might not as a new church. And so like you you guys are right on time. So the question behind all that is uh what would you say to a pastor or church leader who's thinking about starting out? And what what advice, what counsel, what exhortation would you give him?
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. One thing I'd say right out the bat, man, don't chase a perfect mom. You know, you know, amen. Holy Spirit. There's there's no one size fits all approach to residency. There's no one size fits all approach to leadership development. Man, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing poorly at first to refine it, keep making it happen. Like, don't let perfectionism get in the way. Don't try to like chase this perfect example, you know, just ultimately wrestle with the simple truth that a residency at its core is one leader giving himself away to another. You know, pastors would just wrestle with that and just ask themselves, how am I multiplying my leadership influence? Who around me is burying my spiritual DNA, my leadership DNA. And what happens is you'll you'll see yourself in ministry for years. And if you're not intentional on that side, you haven't really raised up other people who can lead like you and have the same passions and gift mixes and different areas. And so I would just tell pastors just wrestle with how you were formed and developed. Figure out a way that you can intentionally teach that to someone else and give yourself away. Um, don't overcomplicate residency. Uh, I've seen guys just sit there stalled out because they're they're just envisioning this too robust of a thing and they're chasing after this fine-tuned perfect model. It's like just start somewhere, just start meeting regularly with some leaders, walking them through some of your favorite books, giving them some real-world examples. It doesn't have to be super complicated. Find ways to intentionally give yourself away.
SPEAKER_00You know, I love that. Um, our residency is in its 14th year right now, but it started with sort of like a glorified book list, exactly what you're talking about. And I got seven guys in the seven guys in the room, and they started, you know. Um trust me, you can get complicated as you go. And um, you know, anyway, I love the I love the way that you guys are doing that. You're just kind of you just started small and you're building and adjusting and learning. And like you came in with actually a lot of experience in this area. Um, but you started from zero at some point, right? Yeah and and figured it out. It's so much don't despise the day of small beginnings. You know, you talked about the one um second year apprentice that you have that's like running groups ministry and whatever. Um any other uh students that you'd want to like tell us about? Is there is there a you know it's incredible.
SPEAKER_01So right now we have um two of our existing students that they're just halfway through an apprenticeship and they're already showing like incredible growth and they're showing an affinity to be able to like lead at a higher level. It's been really fun. We're at that church plant journey where we're now dabbling and starting youth ministry. So it's like each season of the church, they're like growing and adding new components to the church, and so we started, it was all young families. We had a ton of babies, and then our elementary got bigger a year later, and then we just started graduating our first middle schoolers, and I got middle schoolers, and so we're figuring out you know the rhythms of doing youth ministry as a church plant. But one of our present our apprentices is helping us tackle that, and so he's taking some ownership, he's getting an opportunity in a smaller environment to kind of lead and put things together, and so I say that's been so fun for me. Our our worship apprentice is doing phenomenal. Aiden is fantastic, he's running point completely on our Good Friday service. That was one of the hands-on ministry experiences that the worship pastor entrusted to him. Says, hey, you're a graduate of the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami, you're a classically trained pianist, you have all these skills. We want you to help coordinate and recruit the team that's doing the Good Friday service at our at our church and the sense of ownership that he's had of just like, wow, I I get to kind of bring the creative element to this, get to own this. You know, of course, the worship pastor is super involved in shaping it, guiding it, but really in trusting him. And he has stepped up. And I just started to get a glimpse of some of the stuff he's working on. It's gonna be incredible. And I'm again, you know, one year out of college, getting a chance to lead and flex those leadership muscles, doing a phenomenal job.
SPEAKER_00You know, I love that because I think a lot of times we're scared to delegate actual responsibility to people who've never done it before because we're nervous about what the product is gonna be. And um, I don't know. You know, man, if you uh if you stay next to those folks, like and you're just kind of looking over their shoulder and you're doing the model assist, watch, launch kind of you know, pattern that a good good leader developer should be, you know, who knows? He may plan a good Friday service that's better than the one that you did last year or the year before, you know?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean it's what he's already put together is incredible. Um, I'm blown away by it. It's like that's all that's giving them a chance to run and lead and create. You know, it's been fun. I I would say since we started our apprenticeship, our worship attendance has doubled. I'll say it that way. Wow. So in the two years of intentionally raising up leaders and entrusting meaningful ministry by delegating, we've actually reached and engaged more people. So I'm just being intentional about raising up leaders.
SPEAKER_00So you see a connection between leadership development and growth of the church. Okay. You know, that's huge. Like I totally affirm that. Because I think when you do both things, you know both the things that Jesus did, right? I'm thinking about Jesus going around Galilee, he's preaching, teaching healing, you know, he's got guys with him. You know, you know, you know, you know, I don't know. I just think there's I think there's blessing there. There's uh you know, that's awesome. Um what's uh you know, you know, you know, you know, you know you may have answered this before, but I want to ask you about what you learned as a residency leader, right, from sitting in your seat. Right. You're the developer guy, here like lessons or whatever. What what have you learned maybe lately that's kind of shaped you that um that speaks into your lead the way that you're leading?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean you you mentioned earlier about just some of the experiences coming into it. So at my previous church, Long Hollow, uh 2016, our leadership team started a sense like we needed to lead the church toward multiplication. Um with the help of our our missions pastor at the time. Um, he kind of helped us get some resources from Send Network, and we then started visiting some different multiplying churches, and we launched our first church planting resident in our residency. And then uh the next year I took over the residency and started been leading it for a few years before I eventually hired another guy to join our team, uh TJ Joy, who's still the church planting pastor at Longhall has been phenomenal. But here's the cool thing from that 2016 conversation of a leadership team to that first resident, you know, this year that church is sending out church planter number 18. Come on, man. It's been incredible. I would say bringing that same DNA to a church plant in my in Miami where we always want to be asking ourselves, okay, God, how do we raise up leaders from within? Uh, I would say prayer has always been a foundational component to that. So every single day, praying Luke 10-2, uh making that a very important focus, praying to the Lord of the harvest to raise out labors to send out into the harvest. That has been a consistent factor. I would say even starting from scratch again was fun. So, like, all right, we were leading more of an established thing that we had built out and refined over time at Longholl and going back to ground zero. Yeah, I mean, I was like, I don't got the resources that I had in my previous search, starting back at ground zero, you know. And it's been fun to reimagine it. So I would say, you know, be okay with starting and changing and tweaking things based on your current ministry setting. There's some uniqueness to South Florida, very different from the context I was leading at before that has shaped it. Um, but I came back to just the importance of structuring in a way that our pastors can intentionally give ourselves away to the leaders that God has placed around us. As we're developing these young leaders, we want to make sure that we're being intentional with sharing our lives and our experiences. Our ups and our downs are good and our bad. So kind of like in thread with our name reality church, just being real with the young leaders, not over-glamorizing it, but telling them the raw, real truth of ministry and what it's like to be in the trenches of ministry. So we'll we'll bring them in sometimes to decisions we're wrestling with, just to model you know, some of the things we're wrestling with as leaders in ministry. You know, I would say give yourself away. That's the easiest way to do residency. Don't make it something that's not dearly connected to your heart, what you're passionate about. If you're passionate about those things for a reason, give it give those things away. And so you spend time with me, Mark, and it's not gonna take very long for you to see that I'm passionate about disciple making, that I'm passionate about you know, preaching and teaching, and I love doing training and workshops. Like it's just naturally how I'm wired and gifted. So, how could I not just intentionally think through organizing that and giving that away to another leader? It's just gonna be easy. Now that I sat here, I'm trying to pass off something that feels like I it's pirated from somewhere else, it's not core to who I am, it's out of place. And so you know, say that just don't overcomplicate it.
SPEAKER_00Okay, that's that's a good word. You know, all right. Um what have I not asked you that I should have asked you in this conversation? You know, you know, I don't know, man.
SPEAKER_01That's a good question. I'll say maybe what to look for. You know, okay, yeah, let's go. Like when we as a team are looking at it, we kind of go through like two different rounds of things. We we leverage on the front end um the framework and language from uh the ideal team player from Patrick Lancioni. So humble, hungry, smart, looking for somebody who's like humble, they're teachable. They're they're kind of modeling a team first attitude mentality. I want to see that there's a general genuine hunger, like they're driven to grow. They they have this like, hey, I'm gonna take responsibility vibes. And then the smart is more about like emotionally intelligent and people smart. Like they are naturally just influential people in the church. You can see that they leverage that. And then once we go into the application process, then we're looking for four C's. We we focus on character. Um, we're trying to determine chemistry. Do they fit our team? Do they fit well in our multi-ethnic church culture? Um, we're wrestling with calling. Are they willing to put their yes on the table? Remember, I said our apprenticeship is more on that front end.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01So I'm gonna try to help them kind of get clarity, but I want to know that there's a willingness to put their yes on the table. And then a commitment. Like, are they committed already at our church? They're serving, they're already like intentionally engaged as members of the church. So those are kind of like the four things that that we look for um for our ministry apprentices.
SPEAKER_00That's great. That's great, man. You know, I love your word about um smart being about people smart and emotional intelligence. I kind of learned that the hard way for like on our residence intake, you know, you know, you know, years ago. I had some people come through and they checked all the boxes and they did everything, but they weren't really impactful. They weren't moving the needle, and then when they were done with the thing, you know, like and again, this is only like one or two. But I was like, there's something missing and what is it? And that was one of the things that we we identified in our intake process. And so now that's one of the one of the things that we look for. But I really like that humble, hungry, and smart. That's a great, that's a great, uh great summary thing. Thank you, Patrick. Patrick Lizioni for the win. Oh, yeah. So love his stuff, man. It's great. Excellent. You know, you know, you know, I love what you're doing at Reality Church. I love the heart that you and Carlos have uh in leading uh leading out there. And we need a thousand more, just like you. You know, you know, thank you so much for the kind words, man.
SPEAKER_01That's our goal. We want to keep raising up leaders and planting more churches. That's good. Got a huge need down here in South Florida, Mark.
SPEAKER_00Amen. So uh if uh if somebody winds up hearing this podcast and they're like, Man, Gus Hernandez, Miami, like how do I how do I connect with that guy? Can I come down and do his his uh apprenticeship? Um how how can they find you?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. Man, shoot me an email, Gus at realitymiami.com. Very simple. Shoot me a message, we'd love to connect, hear your story, and then just walk you through our process.
SPEAKER_00You know, well, Gus, thank you so much for uh spending time to be on this uh podcast today. You know, my great affection for you and uh appreciate all the wisdom that you shared, man.
SPEAKER_01You know, likewise, thank you so much for the invitation. Absolute honor and a blast. You know, God bless you, brother. Take care.
SPEAKER_00A couple quick things before we go. First, if this podcast is helping you, please let us know. We've recorded this first season as a trial run, and your feedback will help us to know how to shape it in days ahead. You can send me a quick email at residency at gofamilychurch.org. I'd love to hear what you think. Second, if you want to get a residency started at your church, we want to help. We've created a church residency starter kit with resources, articles, checklists, including a couple of curriculum options, all free to use. Follow the link in the show notes and we'll send it right over. There's no hidden sales pitch, no subscription. We just want to help. Finally, for churches in the SBC, Gus Hernandez and I will be leading a residency builder event in Jacksonville, Florida on September 29th and 30th of 2026. Bring a couple of key leaders from your church, and you'll go home with a blueprint for a residency customized to your church, your vision, and your values. We'd love to see you there, but space is limited, so follow the link in the show notes for more information and sign up today. Thanks for joining us today. We'll see you next time.