The Church Renewal Podcast
The Church Renewal Podcast
Holy Resuscitation: How to Save a Dying Church: A Conversation with Dr. Dave Miles (Part 1)
Dr. Dave Miles has spent 31 years walking into church buildings where hope is dwindling, relationships are fractured, and the future seems uncertain. As founder of Vital Church Ministry, he's dedicated his career to being a spiritual first responder for congregations in crisis.
Growing up in Detroit's fundamentalist church scene, Dave found his faith truly blossomed through small group Bible study that "let the Bible speak for itself." This experience planted seeds for his future ministry, creating a passion for discovery-based discipleship approaches that would later shape his organization's DNA.
After completing doctoral work at Fuller Seminary focused on intentional interim ministry, Dave pioneered approaches to help churches navigate periods of transition. Unlike some early practitioners who took confrontational approaches to church intervention, Dave developed a methodology centered on spiritual discernment—what he describes as "seeking to know what the Spirit is saying to the church" and then facilitating movement in that direction.
What makes Dave's perspective particularly valuable is his observation of how American Christianity has transformed over three decades. When he began his work in the early 1990s, the United States was experiencing what he calls "the last gasps of Christendom"—a time when cultural Christianity still provided enough framework that evangelism could happen relatively quickly. Today's landscape requires churches to think like missionaries in a foreign land, prepared for "hours and hours of conversation" with people who lack basic Christian understanding.
The most profound challenge Dave encounters isn't just helping churches solve immediate leadership or structural problems. It's addressing a fundamental identity crisis where believers have never embraced their missionary calling as "ambassadors for Christ." His work involves not just diagnostic intervention but reorienting entire congregations toward this biblical identity that feels surprisingly new to many.
Ready to see your church move from survival to revival? Learn how intentional interim leadership might be the turning point your congregation needsLearn more about Vital Church Ministry at their website: www.vitalchurchministry.org . We HIGHLY recommend them!. You can also visit flourishcoaching.org to start the conversation about renewal.
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Welcome to Season 3.5 of the Church Renewal Podcast from Florist Coaching.
Speaker 2:I'm Jeremy. I'm Matt.
Speaker 1:Thanks for joining us. When we wrapped on Season 3, there were some conversations that we left on the table, which we're giving you now in this mini-season. Today, we're excited to introduce you to Dave Miles from Vital Church. Matt and Jeremy caught up with Dave and dug into the ins, outs, ups and downs of ministering to local churches in distress. This is part one of three of our conversation. We'll bring you the rest of our talk over the next two weeks. Enjoy.
Speaker 2:Welcome back, Matt. It is good to see you again. I know that most people aren't expecting another interview, but here we are once again because we found someone else who was willing to sit down with us and let us hit record, which is amazing in and of itself.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. Did you have a good Christmas, Jeremy?
Speaker 2:Dude, it was tough, I'll be honest. It was tough for reasons that you know about, that I won't get into here. But in the midst of that, god's grace, his goodness, his faithfulness, he was really sweet to me this Christmas, not just to me but to my entire family. He met us where we were Really I wasn't expecting that question Sincerely, really, truly blessed me, that's awesome, I'm sitting in his favors.
Speaker 2:Thank you for asking. You're welcome. We're joined today by Dave Miles. Good to be here. It's good to have you. Man. Dave, you're the founder of Vital Church Ministries, unless I'm saying that incorrectly, in which case I apologize and fall on whatever sword I may have around here.
Speaker 4:And my ministry, singular ministry ministry, because the guy yeah, vital church ministry period okay one ministry, one lord, yeah, other I got it.
Speaker 3:It's one baptism. Okay, we got it.
Speaker 4:We got it yeah, exactly one lord, one faith, one baptism.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's good man, and my understanding is that you and matt have a relationship that goes back quite a while, and so I'm sort of a referee here. I might have to tell you guys to open from a clinch. Go back to your corners and re-engage.
Speaker 4:Well, that would be a first, but yeah, we'll give it a shot.
Speaker 2:Matt, I'll ask you first how did you first get to know Dave, and I'll let you take it wherever you want to from there.
Speaker 3:So I actually got to know Dave indirectly. At the time it wasn't even named Vital Church I'll ask you that question in a while here but at the time, in February of 2013, I was privileged to attend a weekend that quite literally changed my life. That weekend I was invited to participate on a diagnostic team with a church here in the Northwest where I live, and actually my friend who invited me on the team actually got ill that weekend, and so I was there by myself, without anybody that I knew and you remember, ken Ross? Do you remember that?
Speaker 4:name. You know I don't, but probably yeah, I've got so many of these things in my brain.
Speaker 3:So Ken Ross was the local pastor in my neighborhood in West Seattle. We were both doing church revitalizations and he was a part of a Christian Missionary Alliance team that had been trained up to go and to do church diagnostics. And so I joined them for this weekend and it was quite literally one of the most wonderful experiences of my entire Christian life. And it was that weekend where I met some people that I hadn't known before. And I heard about Miles, and at the time it was a different organization and I got curious, curious enough that eventually Miles and I met, maybe the next year, I want to say, or later that year, and we started off a friendship that's been more than a decade long, which is quite wonderful. If I was not doing what I was doing, I would probably be trying to work for Dave Miles. That's how much admiration I hold my friend in.
Speaker 4:And we have tried to recruit him, but he's made it very clear that, like last Augustust, if I remember that conversation we had, yeah, yeah, that was not even six months ago.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, exactly yeah, it's a mutual admiration society, and the lord raised up both of us, which is quite amazing, I, I think, and for different constituencies and his kingdom, which is also, also, I think, helpful and good. So, dave Miles, you've been at this a little while. Tell us where you grew up, how you came to know the Lord, how you ended up in a very unusual ministry for a lot of years.
Speaker 4:So I grew up like. I now live on the north shore of Long Island, huntington, which is on the western side of Suffolk County, but I grew up in the Detroit area. I grew up in a church family. It was a fundamentalist church. It was really redemptive. It could have been a lot worse, but it was that kind of a background. So I came to faith in Christ at that church and then really committed my life to Christ in a small group ministry that we let the Bible speak for itself.
Speaker 4:This is one of the reasons I'm really for discovery, bible study and disciple-making movements. I don't know if you guys are familiar with that Really for that, because in a lot of ways it was time in the Word and then in a community that looked at the Word. That really began my discipleship, serious discipleship process. So that was through high school into college. I was frustrated, even through seminary and graduate school, frustrated with the local church, again because culture was changing. Back in the late 70s, 80s you had the rise of churches like Saddleback and Willow Creek and there was I'm going to use some nomenclature, but missional mindset that was part of those kinds of churches whether we like what happened to them or not that they thought like missionaries, and I guess God sort of predisposed me to think that way anyways. And so that frustration led to a church planting endeavor in Southern California.
Speaker 4:I wasn't the planter, but met this guy, two people actually, a guy named George Frazier, his friend Bob Brady, and they introduced me to this idea of intentional interim ministry and that is, you could go in and affect God's change quickly, and I'm talking about years of learning and I'm saying it like a couple of minutes, but seeking to know what the Spirit is saying to the church. And then, which is that diagnostic process, matt, that you were talking about? It is a spiritual discernment process. It's a mirror and a map and we want to know what the Spirit is saying to the church and then we want to move a church in that direction. You know, facilitate that.
Speaker 4:And so that idea came out of, really out of my own frustration and, I will say, immaturity, you know, arrogance, perhaps even gift projecting in some cases. That's where it came out of. And I went to Fuller Seminary for my doctoral work and did my final project on intentional interim work. You know a practical theology of, you know, interim ministry or something like that. Everything at Fuller is praxis, this praxis that you know it's all about doing the ministry, and and so that's what actually got me into it and started uh, it started me on this journey.
Speaker 3:So those two gentlemen? Were they part of the, that pioneering work? Was it titus?
Speaker 4:something or other titus task force. Yep, that's exactly right. How did I didn't know that you knew about those guys?
Speaker 3:well, you know. I know about them because later in my journey, um, bud Brown and his circle of friends became became acquaintances, um, so I've been very privileged to meet a lot of people over time and so I got to know those guys and turn around pastors now and um, and they, um, and they've actually rebranded this year. I can't remember what their name is but we can link to them in the show notes, but anyways, they do great work, um, but anyways. So, yeah, I knew about some of that early origin because I tried to I try and understand the history of something before I tried and weigh in on it, right Cause I, I think that you're it's just honoring to your forbearers to actually understand it right.
Speaker 4:Well, we think that way. In fact, we believe there was the guy that developed or advanced. A guy named Greg Caruso shout out to him took this thing from a diagnostic perspective with a guy named Chet Ainsworth who had worked for the Charles E Fuller Institute, and this diagnostic piece came out of that. And so we believe that both the interim and this diagnostic piece came out of that. And so we believe that both the interim and the diagnostic pieces, which is part of Vital Church at this point, you know, we discern, we equip and then we encourage. This is kind of what we do at this point. But that diagnostic piece and the interim piece started the seed of the IE. We do it very differently now, to be very frank with you, george. Then they did it.
Speaker 4:George was a former FBI agent, and so there were stories about him going into churches with rogue elder boards and literally throwing people out of a building. Oh wow, oh yeah. And it was now. For me that was very attractive. I was a high school and college wrestler. That was like, oh my gosh, this fits me perfectly. You know, I love this idea of throwing people around, but I don't have the body mass. I weigh 140 pounds. But George had it, you know, and kind of bit him in the butt a little later on. To be truthful with you, that's not the way you change things really.
Speaker 3:Right, you need the Spirit's work right.
Speaker 4:You need the Spirit's work. It's honestly it's, you know. Yeah, the book of Titus provides a really great theology for intentional interim work. So we had to make some adjustments. But that's kind of the start of it and we believe to this day that we are honoring Matt to your point, honoring Christ's work in these other people who went before us. They're all gone, they're passed into the presence of God, but yeah, they were good people, they are good people.
Speaker 3:So to our listeners in the United States, to the best of my knowledge, in terms of groups that work cross-denominationally, trans-denominationally, inter-denominationally, whatever word you want to use, there's only three, and you've now experienced through our listeners all three of them, which is IPM and Flourish and Vital Church. There are other groups that train and deploy transitional pastors, but they are, as Dave and I had an excellent conversation this summer. Near where I live, many denominations are training their own, so we'll save that to the end, because I think that that's what's the future of transitional work and we'll get there at the end. So you go to Fuller, you do end up. You participate in a church plant in SoCal and you ended up pastoring a local church, I think, or two, before you went into transitional work. Is that right?
Speaker 4:I was an associate pastor for youth and missions at a large urban church in Flushing Queens for five years, then went on the church planting team and then I went. My only senior pastor experience is as an intentional interim, so this literally is as an intentional interim. So this is a. This literally is a career for me. It's been, it'll be this February 31 years.
Speaker 3:That's insane.
Speaker 4:Of doing diagnostic work and intentional interim work as the typically as the senior pastor and then as the founder of Vital Church. We didn't really plan to have this become an organization. It was a team in this really great international mission agency that you know was full of these creative people, and they let us, you know, develop this team to you know, to work with these churches in transition. And you know, and that's, you know, that's to our history is missional mindedness and thinking. And we are the grandkids of the Navigators. The organization we're part of is now called Novo, came out of the Navigators, so when you cut us at this point, we really bleed discipleship. We want to help the churches in the United States and in other parts of the West real missionaries to the West. We want to help them become disciple-making, missionally-minded, god-glorifying, community-transforming entities. And that's just part of our roots and that's kind of who we are. And, yeah, we want to do that across the nominational boundaries.
Speaker 2:I have to ask you've been around, as you said, for 30, 31 years now. The world has changed quite a bit in many ways. In many ways it's still the same. What was going on at that point in time in the church in America that you and the guys that you were around were looking around saying, hey, there's a need here and we need to figure out how to respond to it?
Speaker 4:Matt, you want to answer that first. Jeremy, who are you asking?
Speaker 4:I'm asking you, Dave, but I'm curious because you both have a much broader perspective on something I do, and I'm younger than both of you, at least by five years, I think, probably only I think you could be my kid actually, jeremy, but we'll go there so I can't say that he's older than he looks, yeah, so for me it was the inability of the congregations in question to think outside of the normal paradigm of what a church looks like, institutional church looks like, to fulfill the Great Commission and the Great Commandment. So for me a lot of it was a theological thing. They just weren't making disciples, they weren't loving. Well, you know, people are all uptight about this, that and the other, you know whatever eschatology you know that they have or whatever, but they can't get along. And so that really influenced me, just the frustration with the inability for the congregations to actually even care about non-Christians or people who need to be discipled, and the Christian community's inability, it appeared, to, even at the most basic level you know, handle relationships in a way that was Christ-honoring.
Speaker 2:It's bizarre. I live in the social media era, so I can guarantee you that the church only started having dysfunctions about 20 media era. So I can guarantee you that the church only started having dysfunctions about 20 years ago. So I'm not sure what you're talking about.
Speaker 3:I think that one of the things to look at. So if you look at 31 years ago, we're talking about what early 90s, right 93, 94. 93, 94.
Speaker 3:Remember that in that era you're entering the last gasps of Christendom. Right In 93, 94, you could still walk around with the four spiritual laws in the South and you could share it with people and they would genuinely come to Christ, because there was still enough cultural leftovers of Christian heritage that people could be called to genuine repentance in one interaction. And now, over those years, the degree of non-Christian-ness of people like me I did not grow up in a Christian household, I grew up pagan in New York and the amount of conversation that it took for my friends who loved me and wanted me to come to know Christ. It's hours and hours and hours of conversation and that's what we hours and hours of conversation, and that's what we try and help churches now do is put a place for that right when go befriend some unbelievers and spend time with them. That's what church is about and that's bizarre to people to church people.
Speaker 4:They got to think like the non-Christians are in the room on a worship service and you gotta see, christianity is more than just something I do for an hour or two on Sunday morning. You know, it's the last gasp of Christendom. What a great way to put it. And that's exactly what it was. You don't have that anymore, or at least in the parts of the country that I've been involved in. You don't have Northeast Atlantic, northeast Pacific, northwest, for the most part, northern Southern California. It's just not really there.
Speaker 4:And so churches, most institutional churches, don't think to this day like that. And so sometimes, like, for example, I go to a church now that I'm not pastoring because I'm working with just our staff, but so we go to a large multi-campus church on Long Island and their target is disaffected Catholics and that's who they speak to. So there's this religious overtone to some of the things that they do and it makes sense because that's who God's called them to reach. But one of the things that I don't know, matt, you tell me I think we talked about this this summer what Christianity is and why it makes sense.
Speaker 4:Most institutional churches in America, as I experience it, don't seem to understand that, don't know how to say that, what it is and why it makes sense. Whereas there used to be this cultural grid, you know, people had a Christian conscience. All you had to do was give them a Christian heart. And we don't have that anymore, not to the degree that we did. There might be in certain parts of the country, but not like we did Not, particularly not in the Northeast or the Pacific Northwest, at least in my experience, and I think that and the challenge that presents for intentional interim, as Vital Church puts it, or transitional pastoring, as Flourish puts it.
Speaker 3:The challenge is that we're many times being called into churches and asked to help churches who know they need help because they've run into something that they can't face. But when we come to them, yes, we help them with the thing that they haven't been able to figure out themselves, but we're also calling them to this missionary identity that is. That many times is brand new for people They've never. I apologize to people. I am sorry that no one told you that you are an ambassador for Christ. They should have. That was a deficit in your discipleship, because the scripture says that you are, and so this shouldn't be new to you, right? But I'm sorry that it is. It's still right and good and pleases the Lord and is what we should do, but I'm sorry, yeah.
Speaker 1:We're stopping our conversation here and we'll pick up in next week's episode. 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.
Speaker 1: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 us on Facebook X and YouTube. We appreciate when you like subscribe, rate or review our show whenever you're listening. It can be hard for churches to ask for help, so when our clients tell us who referred them, we'll send a small 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.