Speaker 1: 0:01

Hi, you probably didn't expect to hear me again, so surprise, I'm back with another bonus episode from Flourish Coaching. This conversation between me and Matt is a bit more retrospective and historical. As the executive director of Flourish Coaching, Matt's personal story and life experience have a deep shaping impact on our ministry. Today I'm sitting down with Matt to hear where and how the idea for Flourish and the coaching playbook came from. And if you haven't gotten enough of us yet, you should really listen to Matt tell his personal ministry story from season one of the Church Renewal Podcast. We've got links in the episode notes below.

Speaker 1: 0:36

Enjoy hey Matt, hey Jared this is another bonus Bonus Because you and I yesterday needed a break from recording, so we took a short walk. Hey Jared, and also just get to know you a little bit more as both the executive director, one of the founding members of Flourish Coaching and here. We've gotten to know your heart and know you, your personality which, by the way, dear listener, both Matt and I tend to be somewhat sarcastic and jovial. Nah, If you think we said something that's grossly unbiblical or unorthodox, please know that it was intended as a joke, but my flat-out fact will almost always give that away. Mostly there it is Okay. So, Matt, where did the Flourish model come from?

Speaker 2: 1:40

Yeah, so Flourish was started in 20. We started talking about it in 2014,. We incorporated in 2015, and we did as I've said in some of the episodes. We started Flourish because we had a heart for established churches as well as new churches getting started. I'm coaching a church planter right now. Coach replanters, planters lots of them. Among all of the people on our staff. We coach hundreds of pastors over these last nine years that we've been together as an organization and a good number of church planters in there. So the heart for both the hole that we saw was in established churches and help that established churches could get from an organization. So we started in 2015. I came on full-time in 2018, transitioned out of full-time pastoring. You can hear about that story in our first two seasons.

Speaker 2: 2:27

We're going to link to those episodes we're going to link to those episodes and hear a more long version of that challenging story. So I transitioned out of weekly preaching ministry in the middle of 2018 and started working for Flourish, which is now six years ago, which is mind-blowing and one of the first things that I wanted to do was start working on these processes that we now use, and the reason for that was they didn't exist in other places. So our church health assessment, our envisioning process and our pastor search process they don't exist in other places than they didn't exist in our ecosystem, in the PCA, where we do a lot of our work. They just weren't there. You couldn't go and find one. At least you couldn't go find one that was effective and helpful.

Speaker 1: 3:14

So where did you find?

Speaker 2: 3:14

it. Yeah, so I'm a researcher. My background, my undergraduate degree, is in marine science. When I was in seminary I was a business analyst for a Fortune 100 company, and so my background is very much in investigation, in analysis. I'm a process guy and so creating processes is native to me, and so when I started working for Flourish full-time all these things that I had learned and read about and experienced in other people's trainings and from these other organizations IPM and Vital Church I began to try and distill what would be a distinct way that Flourish could do this. So we created Pastor Search actually first is the first one that I worked on, because I had counseled so many candidates and so many churches and saw the awful process that they were using to try and find a new pastor and I was like there's got to be a better way. So I read the books and I developed a model that we now teach to churches to use to find a new pastor, both within the PCA and outside of the PCA, and so we created PastorSearch first, which makes sense. That model makes sense.

Speaker 2: 4:19

Why a church health assessment, you might wonder. One of the things in church revitalization that was missing and needed to be created was well, okay, you say this church needs to be revitalized. They think they're fine. How do we come to some place where we can come to agreement about whether this church is healthy or not? And that's why we created the church health assessment, because we wanted some way of evaluating what is the biblical health of this local church. And so we created that.

Speaker 2: 4:52

And then we took a process that I had used with my own congregation in West Seattle, where I was a pastor for a decade, and we took that and documented it, and that became version one of our envisioning process. That's continued to be revised through the years and refined so that churches in the middle of their life cycle can find a direction for how God might use them to see the fulfillment of the Great Commission in their local community and to do that in a Great Commandment way where they love their neighbors as themselves. And so because I'm a process guy and I think in processes, it was native for me to make these. So that's what we did. That's where these came from.

Speaker 1: 5:34

Did you do that prior to 2018? Did you develop these prior to 2018?

Speaker 2: 5:39

Not formally. So in my head they existed there, but it was taking them, documenting them, getting them in a sustainable way that they could be done so 2013, you personally were born.

Speaker 1: 5:53

2014, you step into, you start Flourish 2018, you become executive director and at that point, you're able to step back far enough and say all these things I have in my head. Let's get this down on paper, let's formalize it so that we can pass this and discuss it and utilize it. Yep, absolutely Okay.

Speaker 2: 6:18

So these three processes again, we developed them not in the order in which they appear in the transition process, but pastor search and then church health assessment, then envisioning. So we developed these three processes and I was visiting with a, a client. So how did they end up in a transition process? So I was visiting with a potential client uh, I don't know, this might have been in 2019. I want to say, and, um, so, talking with them, trying to understand, they just lost their pastor. They.

Speaker 2: 6:38

And they said you know how can you help us? And I said, well, we've developed these three processes and you know, and you know, that you want to get another long-term. Well, we've developed these three processes and you know that you want to get another long-term pastor, so we could help you with pastor search. You're kind of not sure what your health is. We could help you with church health assessment. You kind of seem lost in the middle, like you had a founding vision of a church, but you sort of don't have something now, and so we could help you with envisioning. And it was that client that said well, it actually feels like we could use all three of those. Could we do those in a row Church health assessment, then envisioning, then pastor search.

Speaker 1: 7:17

And that was a light bulb moment for you.

Speaker 2: 7:18

That was a light bulb moment for me, Because I had not thought of that at all. In that moment. I thought of them as standalone things. That moment I had thought of them as stand-alone things that people could come to us and say, hey, can you help this with us? And we pulled that binder off the shelf and we opened it up and we started working it through with them and they were three distinct binders and I'd never at that moment thought of doing them in a row with a church. Well, the client suggested it.

Speaker 2: 7:44

We ended up engaging with them and working with them and I started to research this thing that I had known about but I knew very, very little about.

Speaker 2: 7:52

I didn't know anybody that had been an interim pastor, which was the category that was in parlance at that time I'm talking about maybe 2019, so five years ago and I didn't know anybody that had done that. I didn't know any of the organizations intimately and the Lord just saw fit to start bringing people across my path and to let me start being introduced to people and being exposed to the literature, and what I discovered was that we had accidentally, on the one hand, from man's perspective, but in God's providence and the other perspective we had developed these core processes that are born, the backbone of a transitional process. We hadn't done it on purpose, but we had done it, and so now we commonly will take those three processes and sell them as a unit to a church, either as an external coach to the church when they're between long-term pastors and they can cover preaching and care themselves, or we support the transitional pastor as he works at church through those three processes in that time period between two long-term pastors.

Speaker 1: 8:56

So when you had this light bulb moment and you went home that night and you were talking to your wife, what did she say?

Speaker 2: 9:03

I actually can't remember what she said. I can remember what the guy who worked for me at the time said who used to be the host of this podcast. You can hear his voice in seasons one and two. Um, he said stop, matt, we're doing too much already.

Speaker 2: 9:19

And he was right and we actually took the next couple of years and all we did was, over and over again, we did those three processes so that we could hone them and make them better and make them so. We were good at facilitating them in a church before we started actually recruiting, training and deploying transitional pastors to churches, because we wanted to be adept at those processes before we started using putting them in the hands of transitional pastors and letting them walk them out.

Speaker 1: 9:49

Okay, so I I joked about you being born in 2013. Yeah, um, you obviously were born a long time before 2013.

Speaker 2: 9:57

Yes, I was.

Speaker 1: 9:59

And you got into marine biology and business, yep, and then pastoring. Yeah, we're going to link to the episodes from seasons one and two where you tell your story, but can you give us just the Cliff Notes version of why? Church revitalization, church renewal, hit your radar screen so hard that it changed the trajectory of your career?

Speaker 2: 10:28

Sure. So there's some features as I look back. My dad now passed away, but my dad, through most of his professional life, was a diagnostician. So my dad at the end of his career, the last job that he had is he worked for Verizon Wireless and if you see one of those buildings at the bottom of the cell phone tower, my dad was the master of that building. And so I grew up with a dad who taught both my brother and I how to solve problems and so I had this very sort of intense background in diagnosing things and analyzing and working towards solutions. So that was in my background the whole time, even before I knew Christ.

Speaker 2: 11:12

I came to Christ as a freshman in college, so I had that in my background. I was just sort of sitting there in the background, latent, if you will. And then, once I came to Christ was discipled under the ministry of crew. Both my wife and I we were both missionaries with crew out of college and met in that time period decided to get married. I'd had a very good experience actually in an evangelical free church plant. One of the reasons why I have a heart for that group of congregations is because I had a very wonderful experience. It was actually a free church pastor. That was the one who suggested to me, matt, you should go to seminary. He did my wife and I's premarital counseling and so I owe a debt. Despite having lived most of my life Christian life in the PCA, I owe a debt to the free church for sure. So when I was in seminary I had the opportunity to do some project management, some IT work and then eventually ended up working for this lady at a Fortune 100 company and was trained how to be a business analyst, which was again I had this latent skill set back there in analysis. They added sort of the spreadsheet tools to it and it turns out that I was okay at that. And now that went in the background while I pastored for 16 years.

Speaker 2: 12:20

When I started pastoring the first church that I was in, I was maybe a year in still knew almost nothing other than a little bit of theology. A lady came to me and she said, hey, you're a decent preacher. That was probably a very generous designation at that point. Might still be a generous designation, but it most certainly was at that point. And we're nice people, which was absolutely true. Why isn't our church growing at that point? And we're nice people, which was absolutely true. Why isn't our church growing? The truthful answer at the time was I have no idea, because I had no idea how to help move a church towards missionary fruitfulness. That question thus began a long and wonderful journey for me, as I learned from the ground up church revitalization and sought to help that congregation revitalize and then eventually move to West Seattle to a congregation where the first congregation that I worked with in revitalization was a very young congregation I followed.

Speaker 2: 13:20

The church planter Congregation in West Seattle was the exact opposite. It was an old church that knew that it needed to revitalize or it was going to die, because when I got there it was disproportionately older folks in a giant building and it shrunk dramatically. And, yeah, it was a great privilege to do that work. So I was sort of unwittingly dropped into revitalization. I didn't choose it, if you will. The Lord chose me for it and I think not just for the sake of those two congregations and all the people that we were able to minister to over the years, believers and unbelievers. But I honestly think that God did all that because he wanted Flourish to come into being.

Speaker 1: 14:00

So your shocking, stellar success with both of those churches is what led to Flourish. No.

Speaker 2: 14:07

Neither of them were actually shocking, stellar successes, if you can go listen to the stories in the podcast. And it's interesting, I think that as I was leaving Pennsylvania, which was a very difficult pastorate for me mostly, at least a good proportion of the challenge of that pastorate was the immaturity of the pastor who was pastoring there.

Speaker 2: 14:27

That would have been me, but as I was leaving there, it happened to be that this was in Western Pennsylvania, that one of my seminary professors had moved from the seminary that I taught at. He was now teaching at a college and I went up to visit him and it was describing to him how challenging this pastorate had been to me, how much it was challenging me to grow and change and be different. And he sort of looked at me he's a dour Scotsman. He dug in and he said to me he says God frequently has to crush those whom he wishes to use, frequently has to crush those whom he wishes to use did not know that was going to produce a laugh on the chair over there.

Speaker 1: 15:04

But don't mind our podcast it's the only way he works it's the only way he works.

Speaker 2: 15:12

If he had to work in the apostle paul that way, if he had to work in the impossible that way, then why would we think that we would be different?

Speaker 1: 15:21

he had to work that way in his son, absolutely not because of his son and not because of his son sinned but because of our crushed his son, crushed his son. So I would say that all right, we can preach that we can preach that we're not supposed to preach.

Speaker 2: 15:34

It's a podcast here.

Speaker 2: 15:38

So those experiences flowed into the creation of Flourish and my heart for pastors. There are many times, if 85% of churches need revitalization, 85% of the pastors that you talk to are in revitalization churches, and they're revitalization pastors whether they were unwittingly dropped into it, like I was or not, and so that's how my heart got formed towards church. Revitalization is it's what the Lord wanted to do, and I think that these experiences flowed into, in part, flourish's founding. Can we have time for a story? No, so take it back. Yes, thank you. So in 2014.

Speaker 2: 16:23

So in I moved to west seattle in 2008. In 2011, a lot of the main thinking and leadership and the impetus towards the revitalization of the church have been accomplished, and I'm a twitchy sort, so I get bored easily, and so I started to want to have something that that I was continuing to grow in and could exercise my brain, even as I continue to pastor that church for another seven years, and so I started doing coaching and consulting on my own in 2011, 2012. I'd been doing it a couple years, I've been taking people's money and I was like you know what, maybe I should get some training? And and so I went to a coach training in 2014. And one of the trainers was this guy named Ted Strawbridge and it was a training for church planter coaches. That's not what I was doing. I was mostly coaching revitalization pastors and revitalization churches. But I went to this training and they allowed me in, which was really kind, even though I was a unicorn. I was the only person in the room that was thinking about church revitalization.

Speaker 2: 17:20

So I sit down next to Ted Strawbridge at this big group dinner after the training day and he looks at me and he says, hey, so, uh, so I hear you're the unicorn, so, uh, so tell me, tell me your story. And so I told him the similar story to what I've just told here and he looks at me dead serious and he goes church revitalization, church renewal that's a thing In his whole world. Lord bless him, ted Strawbridge. The Lord used him to do way more than he will ever use Matt Bowling to do.

Speaker 2: 17:53

I have immense respect and awe for my brother, who's now with the Lord and enjoying life way more than we are, and I would not be doing Flourish if Ted Strawbridge had not said this is what you should do with your life. So I have immense gratitude for my brother. But Strawbridge looks at me and he goes. That's a thing. And if you were here sitting here in this podcast with a third microphone, he would say the Lord began to go to get ahold of his heart on that, and so that which he had worked in me now spread 10. And he was working that same heart in Paul Hahn, who's now still on our board as one of our founders. They got to work that same heart in the three of us and what I can tell you is Flourish got into church revitalization because Jesus got into the heart of those three guys, and that's why this is what we do.

Speaker 1: 18:48

Thank you, matt. You're welcome. 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. 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 Thank you, me, jeremy Seferati, in association with Flourish Coaching, with the goal of equipping and encouraging your church to flourish wherever God has called you.