Empowering Local Churches: Leadership Development 101

Music. We welcome you to Mindful Leader. This is Dennis Shaw, and I'm going to start off as the host of Mindful Leader.

I'm going to turn it over to Zach in a few minutes, and I'll introduce him. Our topic today is improving the capacity of the local church. Several weeks ago, I talked about the fact that I wanted to stay away from inside baseball, sort of only Methodist, only mountain sky conversations.

I don't think this particular conversation is only a Methodist, only a Mountain Sky conversation, but we're going to use the dynamics within the Mountain Sky to talk a little bit about how it is that we focus on improving the capacity at the local church into the future. My guests today are Gayla Jo Slossom. She has been a guest on the show before. And Gayla Jo is from the Grand Junction area, and she is one of our three co-lay

leaders for the Mountain Sky Conference. Welcome, Gayla Jo. Good to see you. Thank you. It's nice to be here. Our second guest is Mark Calhoun. I have known Mark. I think I met Mark the very first time at a Church of the Resurrection leadership seminar, and I liked him right off the bat. Right off the bat, I liked him, and nothing's happened to cause me not to like him. He is the district superintendent for all Wyoming, all of it.

And for those of you that are listening outside of this side of the Mississippi, that side of the Mississippi River, the Wyoming side, Wyoming is larger than any single state east of the Mississippi River. It's larger than Pennsylvania, or New York, or Georgia, or Virginia. So you get an idea, and that's his district. He's got like 30-something churches that he's inside of Wyoming, but he actually manages about 50, 40-something. So welcome, Mark. Good to see you.

Greetings, Dennis. Thanks for your kind words. It's great to be back with you today. Thanks for the invitation. And before I introduce Zach, our conversation about the local church, I will relink in the show notes the podcast earlier that Zach and I had on this topic. And I've got an article, a draft paper that I wrote down there a little bit about my thoughts on that. And you can read both of those or listen to both of those on the show notes.

Zach is going to Zach Bechtel is the pastor at Bozeman United Methodist Church and Zach has been a Congregational Resource Minister in Wyoming and he comes to the Mountain Sky Conference from New Mexico Zach also hosts a wonderful podcast of his own called Bearded Theologians, Zach's podcast is part of the instigation for my own podcasting my wife loves it And so, because my wife loves it, it has to be a good podcast by definition. However, I've wanted to become a bearded theologian myself.

And she said, I like bearded theologians as a show, as a concept, but you can't be a bearded theologian. No. But Zach is going to take over the Master of Ceremonies, the host responsibility. And I've looked at it. Well, thanks for having me. Thanks for letting me be kind of a fly on the wall of this conversation. And like you said, you're wanting to talk about how we strengthen the local church from a variety of avenues, but within the conference and those structures.

And so, Dennis, would you start us off and unpack that idea a little bit? Yeah, I'd be happy to. And I've gotten to a place where, and I confess, I mean, I have been a member of the Conference Council on Finance Administration twice. I didn't learn my lesson the first time. And once I was on, both times I was on about eight years. And then I had a two-year break, eight years on, two years off, eight years back on.

And it's so easy for the conversation to get focused on things beyond the local church. We get focused on what's going on at the conference itself. We can get our focus on going on what's going on internationally and how it is that we support that. And those are important things. I am not remotely suggesting that those are not important. But I think along the way, we have, at least in Mountain Sky and maybe other conferences too, have lost our way a bit.

And the fact that our purpose is to help the local church and to some extent, nonprofits, religiously based nonprofits, to be transformative agents in the world. And the world is in the local church, locally, regionally, and internationally. And I think we sometimes forget that. And I think we have lost our way in trying to improve the capacity at the local church. And so I'm an advocate for improving that capacity. And we have a corresponding program that we do for clergy.

So when clergy come into the conference, either from seminary, from licensed local pastoring, from other conferences, we run them through some programs where we sort of help them understand some things that they didn't learn at seminary, they didn't learn in licensing school, they didn't learn at other places. And I wonder if we were to approach the same kind of. Idea with clergy, with laity. I'm about to go to a program that's going to be a master naturalist program.

It's a combination of classes combined with practical experience. My wife is an extension master gardener.

Classes and practical experience. My daughter is a leader in Boy Scouts, in the scouting of america and she has been to some programs where she gets she goes to classes and then she has practical experience and she's recognized for that and i would think that one of the same kind of thing the same kind of idea may either already exist in conferences i haven't discovered it or we can create it in the mountain sky which is to sort of create a person who's So perhaps let's call it,

for the sake of a better term, a master administrator. I don't know if that's the right term or not. But we sort of bring them up to speed on how we do human resources in the Methodist Church and the Mountain Sky Conference, how it is that we do trustees, which is the management of the building and the insurance and all of that kind of stuff. And how it is, there was a third category. Let's see, it was trustees.

Oh, finance. and how it is that the Mountain Sky Conference talks money and how it is that we do that. But primarily, it's about how it is that the local church might organize itself around those ideas and those concepts.

So that's sort of my idea. I don't think it's ready yet to become legislation for the conference. I think it's still at the talk about stage. But that's sort of my idea and is hopefully a nutshell. Hopefully, I didn't take forever to explain. Yeah. No, it was a good elevator pitch and just exploring what it is we need to do and move forward to have healthy, vibrant congregations. Gayla, Joe, and Mark, as you think about the congregations that you're a part of and that you serve and lead.

Help unpack for me kind of where you see this going, where you see the need for growth and education in these leadership areas. Well, I'm not going to be shy then, Mark, if you're jumping in. I, of course, have many perspectives on this. I do think that we have to be a little careful about one master administrator having the skills. I think we want to remember the value of dividing work.

And I think one of the things that happened in our churches is we went to one board for many churches, and then people were in place, and we didn't build in timeframes for them to exit out or change a different role. So they got into one role, like one person is trustee representative, one person is SPR, One person is the finance person, and one person is missions or something. And then they stayed, and they're still staying in some churches,

and so trying to bring people in. In the old days, we had the different committees. They could rotate through, learn the new roles, the new expectations, and figure out some new things.

I am a little nervous about the idea, so I guess I need a little convincing. Thanks, Gayla, Joe. Yeah, I wanted to let you have an opportunity to lead us off there. A lot of things running through my mind as Dennis is talking. I like that he framed things around the word focus and how our focus shifts and changes from time to time. That's a kinder, more gentle word than I've been using. I've been using words along the line of distraction, right?

That we've allowed ourselves not only from the institutional side, but also from the local church side to, we've allowed ourselves, I think, to be overcome and overwhelmed by a number of distractions recently, right? We've had actions of general conference. We've had a pandemic. We've had for us in our region, the coming together of two organizations, two bodies, two conferences. And so we've had a lot on our plate.

And it feels like, of course, those things are always going to pop up and who knows what the next distraction or opportunity is going to be. But I think that we're at a point now where... Opportunities are in front of us, opportunities to lead with grace and lean into the opportunities that we have for lay leadership development and continued clergy development.

You spoke a little bit to that, Dennis, in the lead off with how we were shaped by our seminary experience for clergy or by licensing school. And then there's the practical ministry element. And our beloved lay folks have been experiencing those elements of shift and change in a very consistent way. They're the consistent piece of the identity of the church.

And so I think there are a number of opportunities for us to grow into what we can become. I think part of that really starts with listening to what our lay leaders and the lay folks in our churches are looking for as far as resources. As you mentioned, it's one of our roles, our primary role as in the conference structure to support and resource the churches, certainly not the other way around.

One of the challenges with institutions, even outside of religious organizations, outside of the work that we do, one of the elements of being encased with institutional elements is that institutions can sometimes tend to answer questions that no one's asking. That the folks that they serve are asking, right? That's one of the tendencies. And so I think we have a real opportunity to live into that and to hear from our churches. I think also as we do that, there are.

There are very practical needs that I hear from the churches that I walk alongside, right? And so those practical needs are important. Many times they're focused on the financial sustainability of the church or the building. And so we certainly have to work in those areas, in that realm. But what I hope to hear from our churches is around how we live into intentional discipleship.

What are some of the ways that the conference can help us live into new rhythms of intentional discipleship and missional engagement? And how can we reach out into our communities? How can we do the same as local churches? is reach out and ask our local communities what they're looking for in their experience that will help us create space for people to encounter the love and grace of God. So just a few introductory thoughts on that.

I'm okay, Zach. I'm attempting to answer Gayla Joe's observation from the beginning.

I i don't i don't see this being limited in any one church i mean you can have you could have two three four or five people that sort of do this it's uh it's a credential it doesn't mean that the they become the font of all knowledge it just means that they they could be helpful in leading the local church and saying well what the conference is trying to do here, or what the conference would suggest that we do here to make financial operations more transparent is something, things like that.

So it's just a place perhaps to go to start to get some kind of answer. I'm sure there's people that have watched Harry Potter. I'm sure there's some kind of answer in Harry Potter that would give us an equivalent of that, but I can't think of perhaps what it is. I agree with mark i mean one of the things i'm going to talk about in a future podcast is where disciple bible study is going right now it's um they're going to be going to a app an application that you can put on your.

Cell phone, your pad, your computer, and they're in the process of doing that right now, getting new people to do the introductions and update all of that. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that. And yes, you are correct, Mark.

The subtext of what I'm driving at is to make some of this stuff easy, make the management of the building easier so it doesn't become the entire focus of the church or making finances easier so that we can get on with the real work of transformation so we can do the knowledge of what it is that you need to do for human resources so it's easier so that it no longer is a distraction of the primary mission which is the primary mission is transformation it's discipleship

at the local church for the purposes of transformation i keep reminding people that transformation transformation of the world does not exclude the local church the local church is part of that world and it's it's it should be it's part of what we're hoping to transform as well so i'm a military guy we see we would sit around tables and have meetings about what we need to do. And invariably, the conversation would come back to what's our mission?

What's our mission? What are we trying to do? What's our mission? So you had this mission focus. Mark, I could not agree with you more that we need to keep that mission focus. And I would try to define the mission focus for echelons above the local church is improvement of the capacity of the local church. That'd be certainly if it's not the primary mission, it's certainly one of the top two or three. So, and I think we've gotten distracted, we've lost focus. I'm not sure what's happened.

Again, in the military, I came into the Army right at the end of the Vietnam era, and we had lost focus, for example, on safety. That probably doesn't surprise anybody who knows anything about warfare, but we had lost focus on safety. And we had to change the culture. We really had to change the culture to make safety and taking care of your troops while they were training to be part of our ethos. By the time I left the Army, 24 years later, it was part of who we were.

You did not do something in the army without having safety and production of the people around you, the non-soldiers, and the soldiers just being a vital, vital part of that. And I think one of the things we need to improve our focus on is the capacity of the local church and not so much the capacity of other echelons. That's the first echelon we need to worry about. So I'm hearing a lot of conversation about both institutional preservation as well as local church preservation.

And we're coming out of a pretty big season, at least in the United Methodist Church, if not all churches coming out of the COVID area where we were just trying to preserve whatever it is that we had locally. And for us in the United Methodist Church, trying to figure out what it is we're leaning to in the future.

And as we are able to do that now, in the light of y'all's conversation and talking about focus and distractions and mission and vision, if we zoom back down to the local church and our communities and our congregations, what is that mission? What is our mission as a local church? What are we doing to carry that out? What even is it today? Not what was it 5, 10, 15 years ago. What is our mission today as the local church, as the congregations?

And that's a great question, Zach, because I think different churches, when they talk about contextual mission, think of their mission differently than, say, the conference might. Right. So I think when you talk about transformation, we really do need the people, the laity, especially in the local churches, to understand what is it we're transforming from and what are we transforming to or what are we thinking that we want to, because that sets the expectations.

And then you can really focus once you understand that big why. You know, what are we providing and why are we providing it and how are we going to provide it, where and when and all of that? Who is it aimed at?

But I wanted to, I think you have a great line there, but I do want to mention to Dennis that I actually do agree with you in the sense of master administrators in helping local churches solve some of their obstacles because they do have different obstacles based on what they think they're trying to accomplish, helping them work through what is your mission? How are we going about this? How are we going to collaborate?

How are we going to vision? Those are critical things. So I don't disagree with you there. I was mistaking what you were talking about a little bit. No, Gayla Joe, I think you're good. When you talk a little bit about the single board leadership, often what is lost in that conversation is the why. Why are we doing this?

We do we for lack of a better term we shrink our leadership boards down to something that's a little more manageable not so that less people are involved but so we free up more people to go and do the mission and vision of the church instead of having to put 45 people and leadership in a church that's 30 people right in the old model the way or the older model of how we did those things, but we forget to tell that why. This is why we're doing this. This is what this accomplishes.

And when we don't tell those stories, we lose the why and the who. And we just see, oh, we're shrinking leadership. Oh, these are the only people that get voice and involvement in this. And everybody else is just left to do nothing.

And in reality, when we do that well and make those transitions well, whether it be in leadership or just in mission and vision of the church, We're freeing people up to go and follow their passions and their hopes and dreams for the church and how that impacts their community rather than sitting in one more finance meeting that they're not really equipped for or don't want to do or have been doing for 35 years and have looked at more numbers and don't care to do that anymore but can't say no.

You know, that's the hope. We've got to do better of telling that why. As a local church, as a conference, we don't tell our why very well. And partly because I don't think we know what our why is. I would say amen to that. And I don't mean to pick on any one element, but Mark and I have had several conversations about finance committees. And I don't want to characterize any one person, but it's pretty typical for the treasurer of many local churches to be focused very much on the line items.

And not so much on the purpose of that particular local church as to what the funding is intended to do. They get very much blinders. And it's understandable how that happens because if you start to overspend any one line, it aligns as the bill payers as to how you figure out how that's traded off. But at the end of the day, you talk with a lot of finance people and it starts to become focused on debits and credits and accounting and red numbers versus black numbers and that kind of thing.

And the whole conversation about what is the purpose of this church? What is our mission? What are we trying to do and why are we trying to do it? Often doesn't even get discussed in a one-hour meeting about money. And I think that's an indication of how we've sometimes lost our way. So, and Mark, I quoted you there I didn't quote you exactly, but you and I have had I think it's fair to say more than one conversation on that topic.

Yeah, we've had several conversations And I've had those conversations with folks in the local church as well And as churches are working their way through what's in front of them, what they're experiencing, what the opportunities are, what the challenges are, and there are a number of ways for us to, in the life of the church, go down a number of rabbit holes that can distract us a little bit from the. From our core beliefs, our values, our desired way forward, our preferred outcome.

As Zach was talking about this notion of why, of course, Simon Sinek got us started on that quite a while back and got many, many folks focused on answering that question. And I've I've been in several small groups recently where we talked about how the notion of asking why can be helpful to us. When something comes up and someone says something, a preferred outcome or a desired way forward, we say, why is that important?

And sometimes we stop at the first why, right? There's opportunities for us to ask why about the follow-up answer and ask why again and continue to ask that question. And I've had a number of conversations with local lay leaders and local conversations. Local lay leaders and local congregations about the balance between identity and expectation.

Right. And I, I think that when local churches come to understand the depth of their identity, how they're perceived by others, how they're perceived by folks inside the church, how they're perceived by their communities. I mean, that, that starts to give shape to creative ways of answering, answering that why question. When our identity says one thing about who we are and our expectations, I hear a lot of churches asking about offsetting demographics.

We're feeling like we're getting older. How do we get older? How do we get younger families? How do we get children? How do we get youth? How do we expand different ministry programs? How do we expand our mission opportunities? And part of that, I think, is to reflect on the identity of the congregation. If those are priorities, what does your space say about those priorities? How is the why question being answered? How does your space give shape to your identity?

How do your words, your actions, your participation in the community? So I think there's just endless possibility and opportunity for us to reflect on that and to think about what our identity says about who we are and then how we live into those expectations. Because many times those expectations are pretty tall orders in our communities. We have many rural communities who are experiencing shifts in the makeup of the community.

And also to, I'm thinking of, I think, Gail Joe's point about, well, the point that we've all made, right, about creating a certain culture, creating a culture of transformation in the lives of our congregations and what that looks like. And I think we're shaped by context and culture. And many times we articulate that we, we want a different context and a different culture than what our identity says that we are.

And so there's a lot of opportunity in that to align those expectations in a way that we reshape our, our identity to match, match those expectations. Taylor, Joe has an unmuted. I'm going to assume then I can talk. I think one of the classic problems we have, and this is true, I imagine, throughout Methodism, whether you're international, whether you're global, whether you're in Africa, Europe, or North America.

But rural people, less urban people, see the world through a little different lens than the more urban setting. And when you're talking about Mountain Sky, which is all of Montana, all of Wyoming, all of Utah, all of Colorado, I mean, we have 309 churches, I think, somewhere in that region.

And probably less than 100 of those are urban somewhere in the range of 200 of those are rural a more rural setting and so consequently it's almost like you're talking a different language at times the language the value set that drives that the seasons i was i was struck by a meeting about 10 15 years ago the conference called an emergency meeting on a wednesday of large church pastors. And it turned out that that particular Wednesday, they called this emergency meeting, was Ash Wednesday.

It was like the rhythm, the seasonal rhythm of the season. Of the religious year was lost on the conference office because it wasn't part of their rhythm. And my guess is that that's repeated in elements of the lives of places throughout our conference, that the rhythm of the conference or the rhythm of the local church is not the same. The vocabulary of the conference, probably more urban, more centralized management than it is at the local church, which is probably more individualistic.

And that's not meant as a criticism. It just meant as an observation. And also driven around the seasons. I know I've talked to pastors that have been pastors at rural churches, and their big giving months are like October and November, because that's when a lot of the money comes in for the sale of their crops.

That's when they get a yield for what it is that they're selling whether it's cantaloupe or cotton and they get that and that's how the local church is largely funded by that and my guess is that it's almost impossible to get all those rhythms into your head but you have to at least appreciate them I don't mean to say that you have to know exactly what they all are but you have to be prepared for that and again I go back to this idea of the fact that there maybe is a set of common standards,

I think like in terms of the Venn diagram. But a lot of that Venn diagram doesn't overlap. There's things that apply in Colorado but don't apply in Wyoming. Gala Joe, I lived in Colorado Springs. And Gala Joe was, at one time I lived in Colorado Springs. And Gala Joe is from the western slope. You get two people. You've got a person from Colorado Springs and a person from the Western Slope talk about water. Talk about water. All right? And you're going to have an interesting conversation.

You're going to have a very interesting conversation because their viewpoints on water is entirely different. And so that's just one example, just an example in microcosm. And you repeat that over and over and over again. There's a tribe of Methodists in El Paso County of Colorado, which is Colorado Springs. And there's a tribe of Methodists up in Boulder County, north of Denver, which is Boulder itself.

And from a set of values, they don't necessarily have the same vocabulary to talk about values. That doesn't mean deep down in their core. They don't have a lot in common. But you have to be careful and you have to be managed that very, very carefully. So I'm certainly not trying to talk about homogenizing all of that. That would be an impossible task. But you need to keep it in your mind. be aware of that. So I guess I rambled a little bit, but forgive me.

That's all right, because I think what you were bringing up, the idea of the values and sharing values and I think collaboration. So we push collaboration. We say we want to work together. We want to vision together. We want to negotiate. And urban and rural churches or even in Grand Junction, for example, there are five churches fairly close by. Each church has its own personality and sort of its own expectations.

But when you go to negotiate, it feels to me like in both places, I lived in Denver for a while, I know a little bit about that mentality, those values, and then a lot of work with the rural churches more. But I feel like we have missed out on really helping people understand the idea of what collaboration is. And especially when it comes to decisions, bigger decisions in the church, we come in sort of with a top-down approach saying, here's what you're supposed to value.

And it's scary for people to disagree with that mentality. And so they don't bring up things. Or we come up the other side. If you're in some of the rural churches, they don't want to hear about some conference push for something or other because they feel like they've got what they want for their church. And so they really are almost like in a hurry to make a decision or something, and they want everyone to agree. They really buy into the unity of direction. But before they've actually heard.

Different perspectives and voices. So we've got to somehow bring in this idea that it's okay to disagree. It's okay to bring up an alternative perspective. In fact, if you don't have any alternative perspectives, only one person is needed in the room. You don't need all those people. You don't need all those voices.

So if you're going to hear from those other people, we have to make it okay for them to be a devil's advocate or bring up something and say, we can even assign someone, say, okay, what would the opposite perspective be? We're not saying you have it. We have to hear it to make a good decision. We get into groupthink way too easy. Both sides, I think, Dennis, both sides, the rural, the urban, or the big church, the little church,

this group, that group. Yeah. You know, you all have danced around the idea of connectionalism being in a connectional system. And Mark has heard my soapbox for as long as he's known me about the difference between rural church and urban church. And we saw that top-down approach through COVID, especially with our larger church's.

Trying to be connectional in a way. Well, as COVID shut everything down and everybody was trying to figure out what was going on, there were a lot of invitations to be connectional in the sense of, well, we'll send you our sermons. We'll send you our technology. We'll send you this so that you small rural churches who don't know what you're doing can survive.

And I've made the argument for six years now that we did it better than a lot of our bigger urban churches because we understand what it meant to show up for people in different ways. We didn't have to shift all that much. We were doing all of those things already. Did it look flashy? Nope. But did we do it? Yeah. I mean, we had pastors doing calls, preaching over the phone on big mass calls, right? Because that was what they had and it worked for a season.

And yet there was this approach of the top-down mentality of we have it all figured out, whether that's a larger church, the conference, whomever. When we think about connectionalism and a connectional system and collaboration, that is not any of those things. And it makes it hard for the person being or the church or the pastor being talked at to hear any value when it's that savior mentality of we'll come and save you and do it for you because we can do it better.

And the rural church is guilty of that also, of we don't want to listen to you because we have it all figured out, right? You don't know our context. You don't know what it's like here. And so you're right. We have to get better at understanding what it means to be connectional in a way that's actually connectional and collaborative rather than, here, just let me do it for you. Growing up trying to help my dad do anything, I got to hold the flashlight.

And often, my dad took the flashlight from me because I wasn't doing it right. You know, it just, it feels that way. And when we approach any kind of collaborative thought with the, well, just give it to me, I'll do it for you, we've stopped collaborating. And I think we live in a time and a culture where just let me do it is the go-to rather than let's take a breath. Let's see how we can do this together, even if it's vastly different.

Let's find the value in those different ideas and opportunities and see how they can work. And so I think you're right. I think that connectionism and collaboration is key. But I think we have to learn how to do it. I don't think we know how to do that, even in a system that tries to foster them.

We forget sometimes that there's transition. We talk about sometimes, hypothetically, we spend a lot of time talking about the conference. But we talk about the conference as if it's a fixed entity, unchanging. The reality is that people come and go. Leadership comes and goes. It's not a fixed entity. But we think about it in terms of it being a fixed entity. The same is true of the local church. Local church has a tremendous capacity for change.

Sometimes they just have to want to, or they have to see the need to, or they have to be driven to that. I had a lady visit me. I was a pastor in Salt Lake. And I used to record my, the original origin of this particular series of podcasts was my sermons. I put my sermons online every week. And I had a lady show up one Sunday. She says, you've been preaching in my church for a year. And I said, I don't know you, ma'am. Who are you? She says, I'm from Nebraska.

And we found you and we every sunday you you preach in our church from the sermon that you had last week at your own church 2016 this is pre-covid pre-whatever and they had adapted to a situation of not having a local pastor to the fact that they they had one it was me i mean i could perform that function and then they took care of their other function And I found that, and what she said, it wasn't always me, but where they were in Nebraska, that their solution was not an unusual solution.

They had people, probably Adam Hamilton at Church of the Resurrection, but they had people that were preaching at their church using electronics in 2016, pre-COVID. And so the assumption that COVID brought about this magical technological transformation of the local church is somewhat true for certain churches, but it wasn't 100% true. A lot of them were already operating that way.

Absolutely. And it's that kind of willingness to seek out that collaboration, whether the person you're collaborating with knows it or not, right? I love the ingenuity of our churches to go, hey, we have this need, let's see, let's figure it out.

And to bring that technology piece in or to bring in an idea that we wouldn't have done, we have to have a pastor physically in the room, and yet beginning to see the ways in which a sermon that was produced a week before, that person has voice and becomes your pastor in those ways. Brings you all back down to the why, right? Why are we doing this? Is it so that we can have a warm body in our pulpit and keep doing the thing we've always done?

Or are we willing to shift and grow because our why matters and we see the value in it in a variety of different ways and are able to seek out something we never thought we might have to do and be open to that? I think that's a really cool story, Dennis. We've got a few minutes left. This is a great conversation that I know we could have all day, but we all have things to do and want to be good stewards of our listeners' time.

Is there anything that any of you want to touch on again, unpack a little bit more, have any left in built-in thoughts that you want to give before we go? I think you've done a great job moderating, and I appreciate Mark and Taylor Joe giving up their time. This is, as you said, not a new conversation. We've talked about it before, and I think we'll talk about it again and again and again and again. I'd certainly appreciate the opportunity for us to have these ongoing conversations.

All of us are making statements. The three of you are making statements that I'm like five or six statements back that you made that I'm reflecting on and have questions about and want to talk about. So we'll have to save some of that for another time. One of the last things that a couple of things, Zach, as you mentioned, we heard a little bit about institutional pressure and coming from the top down. We heard a little bit about the opportunities for our local churches and our

local lay leaders to grow in their space. And it's that collaborative work that's. That's very much of interest to me. As an unchurched person coming into a medium-sized church in Kansas, and when I say medium-sized church, it would be bigger than almost all of our churches out this direction, but there was an interesting shift that happened about halfway through the experience that my wife and I had in that church.

We were in that church for 17 years. And there was a point where the laity in the church got hungry and they started to equip themselves. Dennis mentions this notion of Academy of Leadership Excellence or things that help not only sort of mine the resources that are already at play with our lay folks, our lay leaders, but also how there was a desire for lay leadership to grow that was fostered by the staff leadership and the pastoral leadership.

But halfway through our time, there was this flip where...

The lay folks in the church started to grab a hold of things and sort of rise up and say, these are our expectations. This is what we want to see. This is where we feel like we're missing reaching people outside of our church. And that put a lot of incredible pressure on the staff and the pastors to live into that, to react and respond. And it literally transformed the congregation, right?

That perspective of the lay leadership be equipping themselves, whether it was through intentional discipleship, disciple Bible study was big in those days, but also other things that we as lay leaders were participating in that helped us grow and give shape to our expectations and then come back to the church and say, you know, we're missing an opportunity for this kind of worship. We're missing this opportunity to be engaged in mission in our area. And that pressure came from the lay folks.

And so I think that was an incredible experience to live to or live into. Also, perhaps for another time, Gala Joe, we're. And maybe you could say a few words about this, your thoughts on this and your perspective, but Each year, we're adding to the number of our lay-led churches in our conference, and I'm curious as to your thoughts about how we can make shifts at the institutional level to provide support and encourage those congregations that are experiencing that.

I don't know if you've had much experience in your area with that gala, Joe, but I'm interested in your thoughts on that. And I have a lot of thoughts on that, but I see we really are running out of time. And I think it would be great if you and I at least could have a conversation separately maybe on that topic.

But I am like you Mark as I'm hearing people talk I feel I have all kinds of ideas and questions and things that pop up in my mind and so I think it's been a great conversation and I appreciate being able to be included in this and I Mark I'm happy to talk about that the lay led churches and what I have some perspectives on so but thanks for inviting us. And Zach, thanks for being the moderator. My pleasure. Thank you. Thank you all for a great conversation.

And I think a great conversation ends with less answers and a whole lot more questions. So great job. Music.