Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome to the Church Renewal Podcast from Flourish Coaching. I'm Jeremy, I'm Matt. Today, I've asked Matt to open up his vulnerability closet and let us take a look around. What happens when a transition fails? How does it happen and what lessons can we learn about faithful living in a fallen world? Today's episode you may have seen is entitled A Horror Story. Today's episode you may have seen is entitled A Horror Story. Today is about pulling back the curtain on the still not, as of yet, glorified state of the Christian and really of the Christian church. So, Matt, do you have a story? Do you have an experience as executive director? We've talked about times that Flourish has worked with congregations and the process has gone bust. Yeah, Would you tell us that story?

Speaker 2: 0:51

Sure, yeah, I've got a couple I can share. So one story is both of these are several years back. But one story is that we contracted with the church, in cooperation with a denomination, to provide a church health assessment to a church and we worked the process, we did the surveys, we did the interviews, somebody worked for me, wrote up the report, we presented the report to the elders and we made a major recommendation to them and they rejected it outright. We tried to say it. It was a disruptive recommendation, but we tried to say it kindly and gently and encouragingly and appealing to their desire for the kingdom to go forward, and they, out of hand, rejected it and stopped talking to us. And that was exceedingly difficult and definitely felt like a failure, particularly when 18 months later the church closed.

Speaker 1: 1:48

Okay, so you have skipped ahead to where is that church now?

Speaker 2: 1:51

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:52

And there's the. I know it's in a punchline, but there's the headline.

Speaker 2: 1:57

Yeah, so that's it. I mean, that's a. I count that as a failure because I think that I think we did our job and did it well, and we tried to do grace and truth, truth and love, but it didn't yield the prayed for fruit that we had, and so that that is always. Yeah, it just dogs us right, looking back on that yeah doing the post-op.

Speaker 1: 2:20

Are there any steps or signals, signs that you think you missed during that process?

Speaker 2: 2:29

Definitely, and I think that it's improved the way that we go about agreeing to work with clients.

Speaker 2: 2:35

Right, I told a story in another episode about my congregant that fired a client, and this is probably a client that we should have never worked with because we saw later that there wasn't evidence that the spirit had gone before us and was already working.

Speaker 2: 2:56

And so if you're in a spot and you're trying to work but all you have is this is why one board member puts up the arm of the flesh, if this is just flesh against flesh and there's not the spirit at work, we can try and be as spiritual as we can be and the way we go about our work and the way we pray and the way that we write and the way that we appeal and come to people and talk to them, but if we have not correctly discerned that the spirit's at work work and the client church on the other side is, yeah, they're open, they're kind of like. I was with a church the other night. It was glorious to see. They were kind of like. You know what this is open-handed for us. We don't know what God's doing. We want to be open to it.

Speaker 2: 3:41

Tell us what you think. We want to be open-handed with this. That so tell us what you think. We want to be open-handed with this, and that's the precursor attitude that's needed in a church, and I think that we just did not test for that precursor attitude well enough in this case. That's another failure on our part, actually. That made it frustrating for everybody.

Speaker 1: 4:04

Because the preceding things that needed to be there were not there. It sounds like the process after you gave them the recommendation to the time they cut off communication was pretty short.

Speaker 2: 4:10

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 4:11

Did you get any kind of feedback on what the concern or unmet expectation or lack was from their perspective?

Speaker 2: 4:24

Um not either at that point or after the fact, yeah, no, I'm trying to remember um, and I think we even went back and and sought feedback later, and I think it was just more they.

Speaker 2: 4:38

It seemed like that they were convinced that where they had been philosophically and what they were doing now, that they just wanted it to keep working without change, and so they didn't have positive attitudes towards change, and so I think that they disagreed with us because they didn't see that as a solution to the problem that they had, and so maybe that was poor expression on our part.

Speaker 2: 5:08

We certainly tried to express it well, but it definitely, I would say the error on our part was very early. It was not detecting that the Spirit hadn't gone before us in that situation, and in fact, I think that when a church closes, you've always got to have some time of reflection. You know, if we can figure out why the Lord in his wisdom did this, why, and do we bear blame in that right, when you look at the church in Revelation that Jesus threatens to leave and take the light with him, they would have to, after they they ended, look back and go. Well, we were warned, right. So I think that that particular one, there were things that we could have done better, particularly in the vetting of whether we wanted to work with this client or not, and then also for them, I think, just being open to, um, yeah, whatever the lord wanted to do, instead of staying entrenched where they were.

Speaker 1: 6:06

Do you think that there's anything that you would do differently now if you were back in that same exact situation, in terms of being a non-anxious present, helping to depersonalize what may feel like an attack, or?

Speaker 2: 6:23

an assault.

Speaker 1: 6:26

I completely agree that unless the Spirit is working, unless the Lord builds a house, they labor in vain. Who build it? But as you look at it, obviously in every interaction that we're working in, we're bringing our broken, unglorified selves to the story. Are there things that if you could go back in time now you would tell yourself hey, you're already at this point and this is already going south, but make some changes here.

Speaker 2: 6:59

I've not thought about it from that perspective before. I think that our main reaction is was sadness, and I think the lesson learned for us was you know, we need to be discerning when we think about this going forward, because we obviously frustrated them which I don't want to do, I don't want to frustrate anybody and we obviously spent a lot of time and money producing a report whose final fruit was a recommendation that they didn't want to go with, and so I think that the discernment process to think about are we a good match for this client or not?

Speaker 2: 7:41

I think that something that's easy in the development of an organization and and we may have fallen into at this point, but I'm not positive that we did is that you can be and this references the story I told in another episode about my congregant that fired a client is that you can be so desperate to be working on something and feel relevance or just make revenue that you unwisely take a client that you shouldn't have. We may well have fallen into that trap here if we we certainly weren't discerning enough. Um, but we tried to be, but it that discernment at that time failed and um, yeah, that's.

Speaker 1: 8:28

What changes have you made in your policies practices since that time?

Speaker 2: 8:34

Yeah. So I have a much more robust intake side to what we do. Right, we try to better understand. Why are you coming to us? I requested my email that came in today for somebody. Hey, do you do this? And it is something that we do. And when I reach back out to the guy, I basically say we need to have a conversation. I need to understand why do you want us to help you? What are you going after? What's that? What's the the end game here?

Speaker 2: 9:03

Because every time we do work, sure, people pay us for it, but it, it, um, it's my staff, yeah, that are putting, you know, blood, sweat and tears yeah, they're getting paid for that, but it's their emotional energy too.

Speaker 2: 9:12

And mine, it's my staff, that are putting blood, sweat and tears yeah, they're getting paid for that, but it's their emotional energy too. And mine, it's time to coordinate, and an employee that works with me who helps us with coordination and stuff. It's a lot of work to help a client, and so we try and be discerning. Sometimes, if I'm getting the sense that I might not work, want to work with a client, I'll just say I'm getting the sense that I might not work, want to work with a client, I'll just say I'm not sure we're a good fit for you, or I will price it so high that that I hope that they won't take it or, if they do take it, that it's actually worth the time, money and hassle that it's going to be to service that client Sure. So I've definitely tried to be more discerning on the front end of things. Discerning on the front end of things.

Speaker 1: 9:49

What is your review process? Is it just you that looks at?

Speaker 2: 9:54

the intake, or does that go to your board? Right now, it's just me, okay, yeah, so it falls on me that when we have made mistakes here over these years, it ultimately comes back to me. I have to get it right, which has made me, frankly, grow up and ask more hard questions. I don't have a single interaction with a prospective client that doesn't have some kind of test built into it.

Speaker 1: 10:16

How did your board respond, when this one my?

Speaker 2: 10:19

board's been very gracious and kind and understanding much more so than I am of myself, so they don't expect us to get things perfect, and so they've been kind and supportive and helped us pivot where we needed to and helped me learn tons and tons of things that I did not know before, before we started this.

Speaker 2: 10:40

And so, in fact, one of my board members is like a national class level sales and marketing guy and I have just really leaned into relying on him, learning from him, trying to read up. How do you do this? Well, and call him and ask him questions when I'm talking to a client or when a sale that I thought was going to go through didn't go through, and debrief it with him and try and learn what did I miss, and he's been really, really good for me, and so that's been part of my frankly, it's part of my ongoing growth and development curve is to learn from him how to do this better, because one of the things you learn as you learn how to sell is that there are some people that are your ideal client and there are other people that aren't, and better, if someone's not your ideal client, to just, you know, not kick a rock wall with sandals on Sure Right they're going to be better served.

Speaker 1: 11:29

You're going to be more satisfied. They're going to be more satisfied if they find a better fit. Sure Right, they're going to be better served. You're going to be more satisfied. They're going to be more satisfied if they find a better fit.

Speaker 2: 11:34

Yep, yep. We had a prospective client call us, oh, I want to say late last year, and I'm talking through with them and trying to understand, and we appeared to be a good candidate for what they were looking for. And we got to a certain point in talking about it and they had a particular perspective on a series of theological issues that they did not want to share. They wanted us to share first kind of what it was, and what I basically told them is actually we don't do that. None of our processes rely on you being in a certain camp or another and we're not going to push you towards a certain camp or another, because those are not the things that tend towards whether your church is biblically healthy or not. I'm really glad that I was that forthright, because they ended up not going with us and by who they did end up going with. I figured out what theological camp they were in and they wanted us to pre-approve their theological camp, gotcha, which I won't do.

Speaker 2: 12:40

You can be a biblically healthy church in a variety of theological camps if your theology leads you out into the mission field. If it doesn't, then your theological perspective, no matter where it is in the spectrum of conservative evangelicalism, no matter where it runs from. If it's deformed, it's deformed, then we're going to tell you, and if you're not interested in hearing that, it might actually be your theological campus deforming you, you're not our ideal client, because we will tell you that, whether it's left, right or middle, we're going to tell you because that's not what we're after.

Speaker 1: 13:14

Did you feel that failure as a personal failure?

Speaker 2: 13:18

The one where the church didn't follow our advice. Yeah, not particularly Okay. So I think that over the years, one of the things that I've grown in is this idea of differentiation that we get out of family systems theory, and again we can put a link to the Jack Chitama basic book for this. If you Met my Family, you'd Understand. So one of the things that I've grown in over the last decade or so is differentiation, which basically says differentiation is talking about the boundary line that exists between two people, primarily in relationships. But I have discovered and I don't know if this is an addition to the field, it's certainly helpful to me that you can actually be differentiated from more than persons. You can be, as I've written in another place, differentiated from outcome, and so we can link to that essay too, if we want, in the show notes.

Speaker 2: 14:08

So if I'm differentiated from an outcome, what that means is how something turns out. It may make me sad, but it doesn't have bearing on my concept of self. I'm distinct from that. I'm differentiated from how the outcome goes, and so in that particular case, it wasn't like, well, you know, screw, screw you. It was more like well, I'm sad, that was good hard work that we did tried to say this really diplomatically and it's sad for you because we think we know how this is going to go yes, this is sad, but this is a you and jesus thing, not you and me thing yeah, exactly, I'm not responsible for your choice right, and the good shepherd is strong enough to carry you Exactly.

Speaker 2: 14:53

And so I think that I'm responsible to make sure that we put the energy and time into working our process and delivering you something that's quality. Then you have to pick up the ball. Now the ball's on your side of the street and you've got to pick it up and run with it. So time for one more horror story. Yeah, so that was a horror story related to church health assessment. I have a horror story, too, related to envisioning, which is the second phase in our process. So and this was another one that was a we didn't do enough vetting ahead of time. We didn't understand the client well enough ahead of time, or else we would have realized that they were a bad fit for our church. I'm sorry for what we do. So we had a client, we took the first phase of our process church health assessment very useful to them, really made a big difference, helped them lead as an elder board. Things are trucking along.

Speaker 2: 15:51

We get into the second phase, into envisioning, and this is a church that had historically drawn from the whole city where they ministered. Okay, and our envisioning process pushes you to study a particular zip code, not as a limitation but as an application of what are the skills of a missionary. But you have to land somewhere, because if you try and reach everybody, you'll reach nobody, and so you have to land somewhere. And so we encourage churches to really lean into studying a particular zip code. And this church, because they were people that were drawn from all over the city, even though for Sunday they met in a particular location and said, okay, it's a rented location, pick that neighborhood. If you're meeting there for worship, you want to invite people to come to that location to worship with you. Let's study that neighborhood.

Speaker 2: 16:48

Well, very few of us live there, so that doesn't make any sense. Okay, great, is there a big collection of you in some neighborhood that we could study? And that way we'd understand that neighborhood and maybe eventually it moves to a rental location. No, we're really drawn from all over the city and actually we're interested in continuing to draw from all over the city, and so that means that we can't actually get particular about anything. And so that means that we can't actually get particular about anything. No-transcript. And I didn't know that when we first started talking about doing that podcast, I didn't know that that church had not been voted on to close when we first started kicking this around, and so that's another. That's the that I consider that a yeah that's that's a tough one.

Speaker 1: 17:36

If you don't know what you're aiming at, you'll hit it 100% of the time.

Speaker 2: 17:39

Absolutely yeah. So the analogies former mentor of mine, well, mentor of mine now with the Lord Harry Reader talks about the analogy with vision. He asks you to imagine a boy shooting arrows against the wall of a building, on the wall of a barn, and then going up taking his paintbrush and drawing bullseyes around where the arrows hit.

Speaker 2: 17:59

That's my way of doing it, and so vision is this thing that's meant to be there, where you actually focus on reaching. You know, to whom has God sent us? And if you can't land the answer to that question, eventually you will run out of people that you have not reached and your church will go out of existence. I'm sorry, that's exceedingly blunt, but it's very sad to me when a church goes out of existence because it flourishes here, because we want to bless established churches that they have fruitful ministry, and when they can't lean into dealing with their issues, when they can't lean into, okay, we need to focus on something, because we can't focus on everything then sadly, it can end up there, and so that's another. That's a horror story, and part of that probably.

Speaker 2: 18:49

Well, the first phase went really well. I think that we didn't understand well enough what the dynamic had been in the church and been able to say, hey, what you guys have been is not what we're going to try and teach or lead you towards, and so this next phase may not work out well for you. So you're at a decision point because we're just going to frustrate you, which is what we eventually did. We actually did frustrate them and they didn't use us for anything else after that, which is their prerogative right, the client can also fire you. But that was, I think, a lack of vetting on our part, a lack of vetting on my part, as I sold that job, and it's too bad. It's too bad on multiple, multiple fronts. It's too bad.

Speaker 1: 19:35

If Jillian were sitting here today, would she say that you had a harder time wrestling with these things than maybe it may have sounded like to us?

Speaker 2: 19:49

Yeah, so Julianne's my wife for our listeners that don't know Maybe she's certainly heard lots of sob stories about sad situations that I've been involved in with churches over the years, because even before I was doing Flourish full-time I was very involved in my own presbytery dealing two presbyteries dealing with really, really challenging situations. So she's heard plenty of sob stories from me about mistakes that I made and things that I wish had been different. I actually forgot to tell her about the second one.

Speaker 1: 20:19

It seems really recent.

Speaker 2: 20:20

It is really recent, and I think I forgot to tell her because it was a side somebody said it as a sidelight um, to a conversation and it just came back to me actually while we're sitting here. I wasn't conscious of it. Um, yeah, I usually tell her. I'll probably tell her tonight because it came back to mind and I think that she typically, when I tell her you know things that I'm very disappointed in that didn't go the way that I wanted to, she said, well, did you? She's so good at this? She'll say something like, well, did you do what God called you to do? And my answer is well, I'm really diligent and I want to make sure that we do what we tell people we're going to do, because it's a contract and I'm serious about that. I'm like we did what we said we would do.

Speaker 2: 21:05

And she said, well, you did what the lord asked you to, and so she's really really good for that for me, because I can kick myself and have regret and wish that it would have gone different, and but she's really good to just push me back to the Lord and just say, look, if you honored the Lord, um, that was your responsibility, that that was what the Lord was concerned about. And if you did that, you need to ally your concern with the Lord's and not be overly responsible for others. And that's that's. That's dense coded language, but it's true, I can tend to do that. I can tend to do that I can tend to in family systems, you know world over function right, so I can can be overly responsible. Um, am I responsible for each of those church closers? No, I did what the Lord expects me to do. We did what we contracted to do, um, but it would have been less frustrating to those churches and less frustrating to us if we actually had not been involved in those aspects at all. So there you go.

Speaker 1: 22:08

So to unpack one thing you said there at the end and to tie this up in a little bit of a bow therapy is caused is the reaction to someone, me being uncomfortable with the situation of discomfort that you're in. As a result of the discomfort I experience, because of the discomfort you're in, I step in to change your situation for you in a way that you're responsible to take care of.

Speaker 2: 22:43

So over-functioning is defined as I'm doing. This is a piece of the definition which I find ultimately helpful doing for somebody that which they can and should do for themselves.

Speaker 1: 22:53

And so if you over-function in what we do, it's kind of like stepping in where it's not really our responsibility to Right and that's where I want to tie this up with the Boas, because Scazzaro is absolutely right with that when I'm talking about my wife or my child or my parishioner. However, as a pastor, I can also over-function when I don't recognize what is my responsibility versus what is the Holy Spirit's responsibility.

Speaker 2: 23:17

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 23:18

And what is Jesus' responsibility? Yeah, and how far he's called me Jonah, yeah. And what is Jesus' responsibility? Yeah, and how far he's called me. Jonah was not called to go to Nineveh to convert people. He was called to go and give a message, right, right. And the result of their response was between them and God, right, yeah. And I guess what I want to say here is the hope that we have, the balm that we have in situations like this, where we see churches close, which is always sad, where we see people hurting, which is always difficult, especially for the practitioner in the situation.

Speaker 2: 23:50

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 23:51

The hope that we have is that Jesus has been at work and we were merely a tool he was using, and we may have done a poor job, but he's a master workman. Yeah poor job, but he's a master workman, yeah, and he only takes the mistakes that we make and turns them into his glory.

Speaker 2: 24:10

Good thing.

Speaker 1: 24:11

We can trust that we can rest in that, yes, there is mourning, yes, there is loss, yes, there is pain, and there will be until we open our eyes in glory, and until we do, he is faithful to keep what we have entrusted to him and he is able, as Jude said, to present us before his presence without shame, without stumbling, so, with that that'll be good.

Speaker 1: 24:42

Thank you for sharing that man. I appreciate the authenticity of that Yep. Thank you, listener, for coming with us. Yes, we went long. If you want to write in and tell us that we went long, please do so. I love feedback. We will talk to you soon.

Speaker 1: 24:59

Thanks for listening to the Church Renewal Podcast from Flourish Coaching. Flourish exists to set ministry leaders free to be effective wherever God has called them. We believe that there's only one fully sufficient reason that this day dawned, jesus is still gathering his people and he's using his church to do it. When pastors or churches feel stuck, our team of coaches refresh their hope in the gospel and help them clarify their strategy. If you have questions or a need, we'd love to hear from you.

Speaker 1: 25:25

You can find us at flourishcoachingorg and you can reach us by email at info at flourishcoachingorg. You can also connect with us on Facebook, twitter and YouTube and we would love it if you would like subscribe, rate or review the podcast wherever you're listening. Please share this podcast with anyone you think it'll help and if we get a client because of a recommendation you make, we'll send you a small gift just to say thanks, and a special thanks to Bay Ridge Christian Church in Annapolis, maryland, for the use of their building to record today's episode. All music for this show has been licensed and was composed and created by artists. The Church Renewal Podcast was produced by me, jeremy Seferati, in association with Flourish Coaching, with the goal of equipping and encouraging your church to flourish wherever God has called you.