Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome to Season 3.5 of the Church Renewal Podcast from Flores Coaching. Why is this 3.5? Because we weren't quite done with Season 3.

Speaker 2: 0:11

Anyway, I'm Jeremy. I'm Matt.

Speaker 1: 0:13

Thanks for joining us. In today's episode, jeremy is joined in studio by Bill Cianella from Columbia Presbyterian Church in Maryland. Bill invited us into his living room and, as it were, into his story, as he shared his experience serving his church and leaders through a very difficult and unexpected leadership change.

Speaker 2: 0:33

I'm sitting here with Mr Bill Cianella. Bill, you worked with Flourish Coaching, I guess about three years ago. Is that correct? We?

Speaker 3: 0:42

started in the fall of 2021.

Speaker 2: 0:47

So, yeah, it's been three years, and would you do me a favor and just introduce yourself to us. Who are you? What's your position?

Speaker 3: 0:54

My name is Bill Cianella. I am a ruling elder at Columbia Presbyterian Church. Currently I oversee missions ministry at Columbia Presbyterian and also lead our personnel committee and our governance committee. So I've got kind of a few hats that I'm wearing right now. How long have you been there? Since 1995 and became a? Oh, 1994,. I became a ruling elder in 1995.

Speaker 2: 1:30

a ruling elder in 1995. So what was it that led to your introduction personally CPC as a church to the work of Flourish Coaching.

Speaker 3: 1:34

When I retired in 2019, I was asked to use my executive experience to become president of the board of directors for a ministry called Baltimore Antioch Leadership Movement BALM for short. And BALM develops cross-cultural and urban leaders with solid biblical background to serve and replicate disciples in Baltimore and beyond. We also do church renewal and work with churches, many of them in difficulty because they started out as urban churches and many of their members moved out to the suburbs but the church wasn't equipped to present the gospel in the way it needed to be presented to the neighbors around the church. Many of them are going through great difficulty. They're going through frustration and not knowing how to minister in the neighborhoods that they found themselves in now. Frustration and not knowing how to minister in the neighborhoods that they found themselves in now. And one of the things that we did, we used a group called Flourish to come in and work with these churches to help them. So that was my first experience.

Speaker 3: 2:35

But fast forward to 2021, our pastor very suddenly left us. He took a sabbatical and never came back. Basically, and unfortunately, doing that left a lot of turmoil in his wake before he went on sabbatical and certainly during that time, and our church found itself a church in disarray, a lot of disunity. We did not handle COVID well. We did not handle the 2020 presidential election well. There was a lot of division, a lot of strife in the church and, as our elders talked about first steps after our pastor left I mentioned well, you know, balm uses this organization called Flourish and they have really, really been effective. They worked with us in one church where the pastor had been caught in sexual sin, and Flourish did great work in bringing healing and reconciliation and a road ahead in that church. They'd worked in a couple other churches and so we should really consider having Flourish come out and work with us.

Speaker 2: 3:41

I can't imagine that in that kind of situation your recommendation was much of a hard sell.

Speaker 3: 3:48

We knew we needed help. They brought a lot of diagnostic capability. They came in, met with our church, listened to our elders, provided leadership training for the elders to be able to lead in crisis, to examine ourselves first and see what part we played and the way the church was at the time and how it got there. They worked with us and helped us to find the road ahead and seek God as to what he would have us do and where he would have us be, as opposed to coming in evaluating and telling us. And being a senior executive, I've had a lot of training in leadership and organizational management. A lot of what Flourish did was the absolute best of the training that I had had in my career. They were soundly scriptural in their efforts and they also worked with us so that it was our plan that flourished helped us get to Would you talk to me about the church health assessment phase of your experience?

Speaker 2: 4:54

What, if anything, about that stands out in your memory? What fears did you have as that was starting?

Speaker 3: 5:00

Well, the first thing we did was we had a day-long elder retreat and it was on pride and humility and that was absolutely fantastic and I think every session in a Presbyterian church or a Board of Deacons in a Baptist church. If you haven't done that, I would highly recommend it because it was very eye-opening to all of us, because revival and healing in a church has to start with the leadership. And after we did that, we did a church assessment and what Flourish did is they put out a survey for the whole congregation to fill out and it was fairly extensive. And then they came in and they interviewed 25 people with an hour-long interview and the 25 people were recommended by the elders. But we were given extensive criteria.

Speaker 3: 5:49

If we could get one or two people who had left the church recently because of the turmoil, we got young people, we got old people, we got people involved in ministry, people not so involved in ministry. There's a whole list of criteria to get a different sampling. There was also a special survey for the elders, deacons and the staff to fill out and they took all that information and it must have been a 60 or 70 page report but it was well put together, well organized and they picked seven areas that we were really struggling and as a group of elders, we were really struggling and as a group of elders we could not have come up with that list on our own. When it was revealed to us, to a man, we said, yeah, this hits it right on the nose, wow.

Speaker 2: 6:36

What was the experience like for you elders in that first part, going through and identifying people who you knew had potentially bad feelings, had an ax to grind and asking them to come back and speak into this diagnosis?

Speaker 3: 6:53

I was one of the two people that were delegated to come up with the list and I knew it was going to be painful, but I also knew how successful Flourish had been with other churches that we've used. So you know, it was kind of scary for some people and we really had to trust that God had led us here to Flourish and we had to be ready to listen because we knew we were going to hear things we didn't want to hear, and the retreat on pride and humility really helped us prepare for listening and hearing the results of the church assessment.

Speaker 2: 7:29

That's excellent. So I'm wondering about this how did the people who had left the church respond to the invitation to come back and be a part of this assessment?

Speaker 3: 7:47

There were only, out of the 25, I think, two or three and I don't think we had to go past the original two or three that we asked they were willing to come back and talk. I know in some cases I've heard that you might have to go through a slightly bigger list, but they were willing to come back and we're very thankful.

Speaker 2: 8:06

Did any of them, after going through the process, continue on to see the end result of that covenant?

Speaker 3: 8:31

on the list at this point, but I do know that once we got our new pastor, that many well, I will say several people who had left started coming back.

Speaker 2: 8:38

That's great. So what happens after the health assessment?

Speaker 3: 8:49

What happened after the health assessment is that we looked at the seven big ones and Flourish gives recommendations on how to address each of them, and they also counseled that addressing all seven at one time would be really difficult and would be discouraging if you didn't make incremental steps in each of them. And what was some low-hanging fruit that we could do now? They helped our elders come up with a plan to start addressing them. One of the seven were that the elders were not trusted because they were not known. One of the characteristics of our previous pastor was that he didn't particularly want the elders up front or visible, so that the congregation had grown distrustful because they just didn't know the elders. So one of the easy things that we did was starting to get our elders up in front of the congregation more, just giving them an opportunity where people could interact with them face to face. One of them had to do with not being curious about one another, coming to quick judgment, and Matt did a series on the characteristics of God that really addressed some of these things, and so we worked toward addressing them. At the same time, after we did the health assessment, we did an envisioning statement, and that had to do with looking at the possibilities, doing a little research on the town of Columbia, where we are looking at the ministries we're involved in, the needs of the town, and kind of put in a what could be kind of a paper. And after that is when we had an idea of where we were now. We had an idea of where we'd like to be.

Speaker 3: 10:45

Then the pastor search committee was formed and flourished basically trained. The pastor search committee was formed and flourished basically trained the pastor search committee, and then was there to coach us if we needed coaching. I was a session representative on the search committee. It took us really two years before we launched the search committee, because we spent those two years healing and really looking at where we were, where we've come from, uh, where we want to be. I don't think it takes that long all the time it it, it did for us because we're very thorough and, um, there were other issues going on, uh too, with with the church. But once we uh started the search committee, we started the search committee. In January of 23 was our first meeting and we ordained and installed our new pastor in January of 2024, so that went exactly a year from the first search committee meeting to the installation of the new pastor.

Speaker 2: 11:50

That's incredible and that kind of timeframe is not at all abnormal now, especially with the way the landscape is with churches and with pastoral searches. But to be able to do that while you also are dealing with some longstanding, deeply entrenched patterns of dysfunction, patterns of mistrust, to be able to do that and to have a pastor who can come in with his eyes open, not only seeing who you were but what you've done and where you're continuing to go through the process of rebuilding, restoration, reconciliation, that's where it's been almost a year now since the installation. How has that year been for you?

Speaker 3: 12:43

It's been a wonderful year. Our church has grown from about under 200 attendants to 270-275 attendants, and that doesn't include that's on a given Sunday. That doesn't include the people that aren't in the service because of other things going on in the service to support it, and we have kept our online service since COVID, so there are always people who aren't feeling well, or some of the elderly, if the weather's not real good, will still come on. We usually have 50 or more online, so our giving has increased probably 25%. We're in a position that we're looking for a second pastor now and we have hired an intern, a seminary intern. Ministries are growing, relationships are healed. It's just actually been a wonderful year.

Speaker 2: 13:49

Wow that's been uh, it's, it's just actually been a wonderful year. Wow, that's excellent. The? Um. The pattern that Flourish uses when they go into work with a church like Covenant Press is they start with Columbia Press I'm sorry, Columbia Press. Um, they start with the church's health assessment. They then do the envisioning step before moving on to the pastoral search. Can you tell me more about what, as you, as a session, sat together and were presented with the idea we're going to do an envisioning process to see where we are, to see where God's planted us, to see what he's called us to be doing here, uniquely us? What was that process like for you guys?

Speaker 3: 14:41

People were initially concerned because the health assessment was highly recommended. The envisioning uh, some churches doing some churches don't flourish, encourage us to consider it. Uh, they did not pressure us but, uh, if we were going to look for a pastor, we really wanted to not only look at where we were now but wanted to look at some of the possibilities we wanted to provide that that person. These are some of the opportunities we have. Again, the envisioning committee was made up of several people. The elders were involved, but it was mainly people in the congregation that we nominated to be on that, because it wasn't a vision for the church, it wasn't an envisioning, and the way it's described is that it looks at the town, the demographics of the town. You're in the needs of the town.

Speaker 3: 15:31

During that process you interview some of the political leaders, you interview other church leaders, you see what other ministries are being done, what isn't being done. So it kind of presented the possibilities that could be for a Christ-centered church to serve. The biggest thing was there were some people who were concerned it's taking so long. People wanted to just get a search committee going right away and some of the counsel that Matt gave is that people tend to say, especially when they lose a pastor, like we lost a pastor Churches tend to look for a person who doesn't have the weaknesses of the person who just left, as opposed to who is the right person to lead the church, and there's a big difference in that, and so by going through these things ahead of time, it really kind of showed us what kind of person are we looking for and what are the gifts and what are the priorities for the new pastor.

Speaker 2: 16:32

So you had experience as a senior executive. You had experience in this sort of thing. I'm sure, however, though, that some people looked at this and said wait a second, we're just doing market research. Is that pushback that you heard, and, if so, how would you respond to a church now looking at that particular step in the process, gifts and the capabilities of your church?

Speaker 3: 17:09

and what the possibilities are. You're not looking to open up a business or sell a product. You're looking to what are some ways we can share the gospel. We can be more involved in the community. We can serve better. We can be more involved in the community, we can serve better. A market survey is basically looking to address the consumer need. Most people don't think they need the gospel. We're the opposite. We were looking for where are the opportunities to serve and to share the gospel, to bring the salvation message to people?

Speaker 2: 17:49

That's quite a distinction and thank you for describing that, because I think it would be very easy to really not be able to see the difference there, because you're looking at much of the same material and you could look at that. Someone could say, well, we're just looking at what our assets are and how we can best leverage our assets for our niche impact, and you're saying there's a motivation behind that that is significantly different than one that is driven by a need to sell.

Speaker 3: 18:26

There are areas in a church that overlap between being an elder and being a senior executive in my career. There is some overlap. We get into trouble by the two extremes, the one saying there is nothing in the business world that we can apply. Church and business are 100% exclusive different. We also get into trouble when we say they're the same. The church is not a business. And there are some parallels. There are some principles that you can use.

Speaker 2: 18:56

Yeah for sure. Well, can we talk about the pastoral search process?

Speaker 3: 19:04

Yeah, the pastoral search. Again, Flourish equipped us to do it. They did not do it for us. In fact, when we started, they did initial advertising for us and they gave us a 27-step process. We modified it a little bit, but one of the things Flourish helped us with were places to look for the pastor. And they don't go in thinking that they know all the answers and you know their way is the best and if we're going to do it their way, they equip us to do the work.

Speaker 2: 19:37

Where all did you go looking for other candidates?

Speaker 3: 19:40

Word of mouth was one Flourish sent us some. We posted on the Reformed Presbyterian Seminaries Covenant Westminster Reformed Theological Seminary. There's a PCA Presbyterian Church in America website. We looked there and Matt networked for us and we took suggestions from the congregation if they knew of pastors in our denomination who were looking to send them our way.

Speaker 2: 20:12

So where did you finally find the guy who's now your?

Speaker 3: 20:16

Strangely enough, he was the first person who applied, and that was. It was a person who interned at our church in the mid nineties. He was a pastor out in Los Angeles. His wife's family is from Maryland. He was thinking that he'd like to pastor for 15 to 20 more years. He was looking for things on the East coast because California was a very expensive place to retire and I'm not sure if his in-laws notified him that we were advertising or who might have notified him that we were advertising, but he saw our advertisement and applied.

Speaker 2: 20:56

That's fantastic.

Speaker 3: 21:01

We probably got 12 applicants and I want to speak to this in particular because I have friends who was looking for pastors at the same time and most other churches got more applicants than we did. But because Flourish helped us to refine and define our pastoral search and really what we were looking for. They did so well helping us put together our packaging program that we got 12, but they were all pretty strong candidates. A lot of people that did not use Flourish. They got more candidates but the quality was not the same as the quality of the Flourish. We may have gotten less candidates than other churches but all of them were high quality candidates. I've been on search committees before and, quite honestly, you get this and it's like did they read the application at all? You just kind of wonder. And that didn't happen. Out of all the candidates that we got, aura will be serving in good places for them because they're very godly men, very strong gifts.

Speaker 2: 22:16

You obviously had experience with Flourish before this. What, if anything, was the most surprising outcome for you personally walking through this with Columbia Press?

Speaker 3: 22:27

surprising outcome for you. Personally. Walking through this with Columbia Press, I was surprised at a few things. Our process took a long time and Matt stuck with us to the very end and he even served as our interim pastor, flying out here two Sundays a week to preach. They're a first-rate organization. Their diagnostic tools were very good. Looking at the tools that they use, I was very, very impressed. I was a little surprised that there were people who thought that Flourish was running the show and making all the calls and all that, and that couldn't have been further from the truth. The Washington DC is a funny area. People are a little more skeptical, I think, in this area toward contractors and consultants than they are in other parts of the country, and we had some of that to deal with. But Matt, as in all other things, was very gracious, helping people understand that he was here at the request of the session to serve and not to enforce a way or a methodology on us.

Speaker 2: 23:32

Final question here. I really appreciate your taking the time to sit down with me and have this conversation. I've enjoyed it immensely. I spent I don't know if you've had the opportunity to listen, but I recorded a podcast season with Matt and getting to speak with him. We did, I think, 26 different episodes, getting to speak with him about the process in detail and hear from his perspective how God uses the work that he leads there with Flourish to serve churches, and also being able to see exactly what you're talking about the absolute commitment to the highest standards in the analysis, the application, but also the lengths that he intentionally goes to to walk humbly with the church to recognize that he is not the answer, that Flourish is not the answer, that they're there to come alongside, to help, ask questions, to help get a church Sepak up on their feet and moving in the direction that God's calling them. Really, you know, the thing that we talked about all the time is what he's doing is trying to help a church discern, hear and follow the voice of Jesus.

Speaker 3: 24:47

And that's a great summary of what he does. That's what we, I think, most appreciated was the fact that he came alongside of us. We asked him to equip us to select a pastor, and he gets an A-plus on that. He equipped us to select the pastor, and Matt's a very humble man. He's outgoing, he's got that strong New York personality, but that never equate that with a lack of humility. He's a very humble person, um, because, as I said, um, we did not hire him to choose a pastor for us. We hired him to equip us to choose a pastor, and and he did that and couldn't have done it better.

Speaker 2: 25:25

I can't think of a better place to leave it than right there. Bill, thank you again for your time. This has been an absolute pleasure.

Speaker 3: 25:30

I think it's my pleasure.

Speaker 1: 25:33

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. For more information. Go to our website, flourishcoachingorg, or send an email to info at flourishcoachingorg. You can also connect with Thank you gift to say thanks. A huge thank you to all our guests for making the time to share their stories with us. We are really blessed to have all these friends and partners. All music for this show has been licensed and was composed and created by artists. The Church Renewal Podcast was directed and produced by Jeremy Seferati in association with Flourish Coaching, with the goal of equipping and encouraging your church to flourish wherever God has called you. Bye for now.