Church health

Lee Stephenson: 00:00:08

Hey everyone. Welcome to the unfiltered podcast. My name is Lee Stevenson, church planter and have the privilege of overseeing church planting with Converge.

And my co host here, I'm Danny.

Danny Parmelee: 00:00:18

Parmelee and I oversee church planting for Converge Mid America.

Lee Stephenson: 00:00:21

We've got a great guest with us today.

This is Bryan Moak and Bryan works alongside Danny specifically as over overseeing church strengthening with the Mid America district here in Converge. And welcome. Glad to have you, Brian.

Bryan Moak: 00:00:34

It is good to be with you boys.

Lee Stephenson: 00:00:37

And I want to just begin by asking a question.

When you, you work with a lot of more established churches and in that process you get to come in and help them rethink systems because something's broken or help them figure out how to get healthier than where they are. For a lot of our guys that are listening to this, they're church planters or thinking about church planting.

What are one or two things that you would want to tell them on the front side of it kind of going, hey, watch this, pay attention to this and it will help health long term so somebody like you doesn't have to come in to help clean up the mess.

Bryan Moak: 00:01:15

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I want to come in. Guard the vision with your life.

So what happens is as our churches get going and they get birthed and they start to become more mature, we start adding stuff and we start adding stuff that makes sense at first and all of a sudden we're adding stuff that no longer makes sense to the vision.

And if there's one thing that I see over and over again is once you start something, it is really hard to get rid of it and things become sacred cows really quickly. And so my recommendation is protect the vision, guard the vision, sell the vision. Say no more than you say, yes, that's great.

Lee Stephenson: 00:02:02

Anything else? What would be next beyond that?

Bryan Moak: 00:02:06

So I thought that was.

Danny Parmelee: 00:02:09

That was it. That was your one question.

Bryan Moak: 00:02:12

You've been, I've been prepping for that for like days. And now the other thing I would say is be careful about your leaders that you put in leadership.

The phrase is be slow to hire and quick to fire in a sense, with your leadership team, obviously you're not firing them because they're not staff, so to speak.

But man alive, it's hard to get rid of leaders that are not on board and so be slow to test leaders well before you put them into those leadership positions.

Danny Parmelee: 00:02:51

Yeah.

As you work with some of the churches that have maybe come to the end of their life cycle and I know that you've coached some to consider Either a replant or even kind of giving away their buildings. And so planters obviously get very excited about those opportunities, but coach the church planners how to approach a church.

So I know that some planners, like, I'm just going to come in there and I'm going to sell my division and they're going to be so excited, they're just going to give me their building. They say, see ya, See ya. So give them some advice if there's even that opportunity on the horizon.

Some things that they should be just thinking through mentally as they are approaching that church or that board.

Bryan Moak: 00:03:33

Yeah. Bottom line is don't approach a church that you aren't willing to build relationship with first.

Don't go cold call churches and say, hey, I Notice you have 15 people on Sunday morning. You want to be done so that we can move in.

All that's just, you know, we know that as church planters, I think the importance of building relationships with people. Right. And well, we need to do the same thing with other churches.

Build relationships with other pastors in town, get connected in pastoral groups so that you're rubbing shoulders with people need them. By the way, don't think that you're the one coming in with all the great answers and all that, but come with humility.

Come wanting to build relationships. They can smell a bait and switch all over the place. Just like people that we're sharing our faith with. Right. Same thing.

And you need to love people first. So love these churches, love these pastors, but also share your dreams with them. Right.

It's not that you can't say, hey, this is our dream, that we don't have to be in the why anymore, that we can have our own building.

And the reality is there are buildings out there, and if we're not rebirthing them as churches, they end up being restaurants or mosques or we need to resurrect them to be vibrant churches again. But you don't want to be stomping on people to get there.

Lee Stephenson: 00:05:09

Yeah, I know for a lot of church planners, like their desire is to plan a healthy church. And we've talked about in past episodes, it's hard to manage things you can't measure.

But health is honestly, it's one of those things is how do you measure that? I mean, how do you take the blood pressure of a church and have. Have vitals and those type of pieces?

So with the work that you're doing, what are some tools out there that you would recommend for church planners to begin even early on implementation when it comes to understanding and being able to measure the health of their church.

Bryan Moak: 00:05:44

Yeah, so we just simply from a philosophy perspective, we tend to measure what we can count.

And we can count things that are less spiritual, like the three Bs, buildings, bodies and budgets, but we can also count things that are really effective, like salvations and baptisms and things like that. And those are important things. But church health, a lot of it is qualitative stuff.

It's stuff that's more the perceptions and the feelings of people that sort of this Holy Spirit thing is happening around us. And how do you do that? So we use a tool that is quite popular among churches called Natural Church Development, NCD for short.

And we help churches deal with through that assessment tool. It deals with the qualitative issues that churches need to be about.

Eight character qualities that every church, no matter your ethnic makeup, what country you are in the world, what sort of theological framework you're a part of. So every church not only needs to have worship, for instance, but they need to have inspiring worship.

Every church has leaders, but are they empowering leaders? Every church has structures, but are they effective structures? And so that adjective in front of those words are what NCD tries to deal with.

And we've done NCD with lots of churches that are church plants.

And I think that the sooner that you get to assessment of what is real and then be dreaming about a preferred future man, things can get off the rails real quick. And I think churches that are serious about it. The other tool we use is church unique.

And that's an opportunity to be reminding yourself what is that thought thing that God has put in the DNA of your church that is unique from the church down the street? And how do you keep that fresh even again as a church plant, you guys know it can get off the rails quickly.

And so just to be reminded of that vision. So those are just two tools right off the bat that I think are super effective.

Lee Stephenson: 00:07:53

Let me ask a follow up question on ncd. What have you seen happen in the life of a church when they instill that and then actually follow the protocol, like say a year and even two.

Bryan Moak: 00:08:05

Years after that initial number one, there is not a magic pill to grow your church and to make your church healthy, you have to pray, pray and then, oh, by the way, pray.

And so the prayer piece, I can walk into a church, NCD aside, I can walk into a church and I can tell you how healthy their church is by the prayer life of their church. And it can be a growing church. And I can tell you that it's not spiritually healthy because they're not committed to prayer.

And so that's the first thing. But an assessment is an assessment is an assessment. And so there's all sorts of good ones out there.

And if you just simply do it and then put it on a shelf and say, oh, that was interesting and never do anything with it, it's not going to be effective.

And so what makes NCD effective is when you actually play it out and implement changes with what we say is your minimum factor, that thing that scores the lowest.

And we found, again, it's not a magic bullet, but we found if you play that out, if you strategize and set goals related to that minimum factor, that as you go and take successive NCDs, those scores will get higher. And oh, by the way, you also find after 2, 3 years that your church is getting healthier as well.

And a lot of times, you know, healthy things grow and you don't want to, you want to be unapologetic about healthy things growing.

And just last thing on that is, you know, Luke 14, when Jesus is sharing about the great banquet and God says, you know, because people aren't coming for a variety of reasons, and he says, go out into the highways and hedges and compel people to come in, you know, beg them to come to the banquet that I'm setting so that my house would be full. And so, you know, I, I always say don't be unapologetic. You want your church to grow, you want your, but you want your church to grow the right way.

The, the, the, the God honoring gospel centric way. And so that's really what we're trying to do.

Danny Parmelee: 00:10:06

Can you give a couple examples of some of those minimum factors? Very specifically, like, oh, a church, you know, had these couple things. Were there minimum, minimum factors. This is what they did to adjust it.

And then this is how they saw growth over time.

Bryan Moak: 00:10:22

Yeah. So to be honest with you, I've been in this process with the NCD for three years, less than three years.

And so I haven't quite seen me being in the bottom end of a process and coming and seeing that raise.

However, I do have churches that anecdotally, as I come in and do their third, fourth ncd, I have some churches that every year do NCD to set their goals and as a church. And so we, so I've seen that become.

Danny Parmelee: 00:10:57

But I mean, just, just give some examples. I'm saying, so if someone is scoring low, which I'm guessing some of them.

Lee Stephenson: 00:11:04

They Wouldn't inspiring worship.

Bryan Moak: 00:11:05

So I'll use. I'll use small groups. Yeah, Holistic small groups. Every church wants to have small groups.

Churches that get serious about that when that's their minimum factor. I have seen churches that, when they say, oh, my goodness, we've just kind of been putting small groups as just sort of an extra thing.

But when they look at it and say, and we had. Here's a great one. We had a church that was 1,000 people and had 80% of their church in small groups. Their minimum factor was holistic small groups.

Were they shocked?

Danny Parmelee: 00:11:38

Were they mad at you?

Bryan Moak: 00:11:39

Well, they're like, this can't be right, because almost all of our church is a part of small groups, which is amazing. But what they found out was it was not spiritually impacting their people. It was just this thing that they did.

And so it really helped them as they played that through to say, hey, we've got this, but we gotta rethink why we're doing small groups so that it really is affecting people on a spiritual level.

Danny Parmelee: 00:12:05

So maybe that's exactly, exactly what I was. Thanks, Brian. Wow.

Lee Stephenson: 00:12:11

Well, Brian, I appreciate you taking the time to be with us today and share some of your background and helping our church planners think about health from the get go and some of those great tools that exist out there. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. This is the unfiltered podcast, and until next time, keep it real.