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Chad Brooks on Practical Tools for Normal-Sized Churches · Future Christian

0:07
>> Paul: Welcome to the Future Christian Podcast, your
0:10
source for insights and ideas on how to lead your church in
0:13
the 21st century. At the Future Christian
0:16
Podcast, we talk to pastors, authors,
0:19
and other faith leaders for helpful advice and practical
0:21
wisdom to help you and your community of faith
0:24
walk boldly into the future. Whether
0:27
you're a pastor, church leader, or a passionate member
0:30
of your faith community, this podcast is
0:33
designed to challenge, inspire, and equip
0:36
you with the tools you need for impactful ministry.
0:39
And now for a little bit about the guest for this episode.
0:44
>> Martha Tatarnic: Welcome to the Future Christian Podcast. Today,
0:47
Loren Richmond Jr. Is in conversation with
0:50
Chad Brooks. Chad is an
0:52
ordained elder in the United Methodist Church and
0:55
currently serves on the staff of the Louisiana
0:58
Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church
1:01
as a congregational vitality strategist.
1:04
He lives in central Louisiana with his wife of 20
1:07
years, Meredith. Chad is a graduate of
1:10
Louisiana Tech University and Asbury
1:13
Theological Seminary. Chad grew up in the
1:16
church as the son of an SBC
1:19
pastor and has spent his career working in all
1:22
aspects of church, from technical
1:24
production, director of churches and a major seminary
1:27
to a pastor of established churches and church
1:30
plants. He has stewarded the productive
1:33
pastor community for 20 years and
1:36
is equally passionate about seeing revival
1:38
as he is about resourcing pastors in all
1:41
aspects of healthy ministry. When not
1:44
reading and thinking about the church, he enjoys
1:47
practicing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and being in the
1:50
outdoors at his hunting camp. A
1:53
reminder, before we start today's conversation,
1:56
please take a moment to subscribe to the podcast, leave
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a review and share Future Christian with a friend.
2:02
Connect with Loren, Martha and Future Christian
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on Instagram. Shoot us an
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email at loren @resonate
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mediapro.com with comments,
2:12
questions, or ideas for future episodes.
2:15
We appreciate your voice in how we faithfully discern
2:18
the future of the church.
2:29
>> Loren: All right, welcome to the Future Christian Podcast. This is Loren Richmond
2:32
Jr. And I am pleased to be joined today by the Reverend
2:35
Chad Brooks. Hello and welcome to the show.
2:37
>> Chad: Hey, it's great to be on, man.
2:40
>> Loren: Yeah. Looking forward to having this conversation
2:42
recorded. I guess we. I feel like we've had half this
2:45
conversation before in the past, so hopefully
2:48
we're going to share with our. Our listeners here.
2:50
>> Chad: It won't be. It won't be just private. I hate when you have those fun, private
2:53
conversations. You're really wishing the microphones were
2:56
around right for it.
2:58
>> Loren: Right?
3:01
Yeah.
3:02
So let's begin with this. Uh, what part of the world
3:05
are you coming from today? Tell us about, uh, your neck of the
3:08
woods.
3:08
>> Chad: Yeah. So I live in central
3:10
Louisiana, which is Maybe the most un. Louisiana part
3:13
of Louisiana. But, uh, I grew up here,
3:16
was gone for 25 years. Kind of lived other places in the South.
3:19
Spent a lot of time in North Louisiana and moved back home a couple years
3:22
ago. And it's, uh, kind of weird. I'm two
3:25
blocks from the elementary school I grew up with, a half mile
3:28
from my mom and dad. But, uh, I'm here.
3:31
Alexandria is a city that exists because something has to be in the middle.
3:34
But, uh, it's handy for me in my day job.
3:38
So it's. It's a. It's a fun place. I'm a big fan of.
3:41
>> Loren: Yeah, yeah, yeah,
3:43
yeah.
3:44
Talk about your, uh, Talk m. About your spiritual journey, what that's looked like in
3:47
the past and what that looks like today.
3:49
>> Chad: Yeah. So I grew up the son of
3:52
a Southern Baptist megachurch pastor.
3:56
So, um, you know, especially if you're in the Deep South,
3:59
I always call these churches and I talk about a little bit and other
4:02
stuff I've done. There's always the big church down the street.
4:06
And so I grew up in one of those and had been a big chart. It'd been
4:09
a big church for 40 years.
4:12
And I had a. You know, a lot of folks that might have that
4:15
story of, uh, you know, growing up in, like, evangelical
4:18
large church pastors. Kid got, uh,
4:21
some gnarly sides of that story. And I don't like. I had.
4:24
My dad's awesome. He retired two years
4:27
ago. Uh, had a great experience,
4:29
fantastic church, tons of great people.
4:32
And I, uh, didn't realize how unique that was until
4:35
I went away to college at a small private Baptist college
4:38
my parents graduated from and realized,
4:41
uh, very quickly that I was not that
4:43
Southern Baptist. Uh,
4:47
didn't realize growing up that, you know, the church I grew up with was
4:50
not that Baptist either. And, uh, you know, so that
4:53
kind of started this. I became this denominational mutt
4:56
for a long time, uh, cruising around, uh,
4:59
checking different stuff out. Had a. Had a job actually
5:01
in an SBC church as a youth pastor in my early
5:04
20s. And that really solidified the whole. Okay, Chad, you
5:07
were not Baptist. And
5:10
around that time, I, uh, I, I've
5:13
always read, I'm a voracious reader, and
5:16
I somehow stumbled across church history.
5:19
When I was in college, I transferred to a.
5:22
A state university and I, I was a history major
5:25
and I took a History of the Christian Church class. And I
5:28
don't think I had ever heard anything about Christianity
5:32
before, like 1900.
5:35
Yeah, it threw me into the church fathers, the
5:38
creeds, you Know the great tradition, all of that.
5:41
And that really started me down this exploratory path to uh, finding
5:44
something different that made more sense to me.
5:46
And I discovered United Methodism, really I discovered John
5:49
Wesley and found a
5:52
lot of. I fell in love with Wesley,
5:55
went to seminary as a Southern Baptist, still went to a
5:58
predominantly Methodist school as a Southern Baptist and quickly
6:01
realized that one of the reasons I had such an affinity for
6:04
Methodism was I pretty much had grown up
6:07
a theological Wesleyan without knowing it.
6:10
And one of the interesting things about my dad's church is
6:13
the pastors, the senior pastors of that church
6:16
typically have very long tenures. And so my
6:19
dad was on staff there for 40 something years, was a youth pastor for
6:22
20 years and the senior pastor for 25 years and the
6:25
senior pastor he followed. Um, I
6:28
grew up fishing with him, hunting with him. I mean he was like a
6:31
second grandfather to me. Uh, was there
6:34
for almost 30 years. And when dad retired,
6:36
uh, or when he retired, dad started taking some of his, got a lot of
6:39
his books. And then, uh, and when
6:42
dad retired, the books of my dad's that I wanted were all the old
6:45
books, most of them he had taken from Big John. And
6:48
I realized like the majority of them came from the
6:50
Abington Publishing House, which was the old, one of the old United
6:53
Methodist publishing imprints.
6:55
>> Loren: Yeah.
6:55
>> Chad: And I started realizing, you know, 20 years ago in seminary that I was
6:58
actually a theological Wesleyan. But the longer I've
7:01
gotten from there, I realized, oh no, this is the bedrock of this. Like I
7:04
actually grew up, uh, is this
7:07
in this really weird Southern Baptist church
7:10
that was a lot more Wesleyan?
7:12
Um, like I never heard the word Calvinism until I was
7:15
19 years old.
7:17
>> Loren: Yeah.
7:18
>> Chad: And so a lot of my own just shape and
7:21
structure, I tell people, is as I found United
7:23
Methodism. It was almost like this adopted kid who finds his
7:26
birth parents but had great
7:29
adoptive parents along the way.
7:32
And so I've got a weird journey, you know, into
7:35
Methodism. Uh, but so much of it was
7:37
really, and it's still today, I mean,
7:41
very, um, rooted historical Christianity, uh,
7:44
that sort of piece. And so like my own practice is not. In the last,
7:47
you know, five or ten years, I've ah, really fell in love with
7:50
the Episcopal tradition and the prayer book.
7:52
Um, uh, my wife grew up
7:55
Catholic and always says I'd make a really good Roman Catholic too.
7:58
And so that's, that's what's interesting is, you know, my own
8:01
shape and future a lot of ways is
8:04
always kind of looking backwards more.
8:08
Um, but Looking in backwards in light of the future, I
8:11
guess.
8:12
>> Loren: Yeah, yeah.
8:14
And uh, why don't you share just, just briefly kind of
8:17
about some of your professional experience because we're
8:20
certainly going to get into it here and then like your current role.
8:23
>> Chad: Yeah, yeah. So I uh, I got
8:26
my first paycheck from a church when I was 20 years old.
8:30
And so I've, I mean I've, I've, I've been in ministry
8:33
uh my entire adult life. Ran the gamut,
8:36
you know youth pastor at small Baptist church. Was uh,
8:39
worked on campus ministry staff for a while.
8:42
When I was in seminary I was the technical director of
8:45
our chapel. I uh, went to Asbury and so for us
8:48
chapel was five or six hundred students and so managing
8:51
the technical side of chapel, the PA system. Yeah,
8:54
I ran our design team for chapel for several years.
8:58
Worked uh, inside of a lot of special projects uh
9:01
under uh, Reverend J.D. walt when he was there.
9:04
And then I left uh seminary and went into United
9:06
Methodist itinerancy. Served established
9:09
churches. Uh, I church planted for nine years.
9:12
Uh got a chance to uh, to, to start a
9:15
fantastic church. You know saw that through
9:18
like the full phase of church planning from
9:21
you know being portable for several years, being semi portable.
9:24
Uh we built a sanctuary during COVID which was a
9:27
horrible and great idea.
9:30
Um, uh, merged with a small
9:32
tiny little Methodist church ah during that period as
9:35
well. And uh, left a couple of
9:38
years ago with just a call to something different. Uh,
9:41
I spent a couple of years uh, inside it in Methodism we
9:44
call extension ministry where I had my mission. I
9:47
was really not at a local church. I had a little preaching
9:50
station church uh one quarter
9:52
time that was really opened my
9:55
eyes to a lot of, a lot of fun stuff. Um
9:58
and then two years ago stepped into my current
10:01
role as the congregational strategist for the Louisiana
10:04
Conference United Methodist Church.
10:09
>> Loren: Yeah, thanks for sharing all that.
10:11
I'm wondering like, and this is kind of an off the off the
10:14
cuff question a little bit like you mentioned
10:17
kind of being a theological mud and
10:21
Wesleyan, uh, theological Wesleyan in
10:24
your youth and your Baptist tradition either.
10:27
What are some elements from your Baptist
10:30
tradition if any that you still find meaningful
10:33
that you still incorporate into your spiritual life
10:36
today? For me I still
10:40
carrying around and reading a King James Bible.
10:43
>> Chad: Well uh, we were niv people so oh
10:46
my goodness, I never did King James. That's a part of
10:49
it. My dad's church was always seen not
10:52
theologically but just practically
10:55
as kind of a more progressive forward thinking
10:58
church. And so a lot of that it's Kind of what I said, like, when I got around
11:00
real Baptists, I was like, I'm not one of y'. All. What's going on
11:03
here? Um, I'll say. You know, I
11:06
think that a couple of things, and they're
11:09
not necessarily owned by that tradition.
11:13
Um, but, you know, the private devotion was
11:15
a big thing growing up there. That
11:18
still carries today. Um, that.
11:21
That absolutely kind of hangs on. And then,
11:24
uh, just evangelism,
11:26
like, I can never not focus
11:30
about evangelism. Um, that was
11:33
just always right in front of things,
11:36
and I've never left that behind.
11:40
>> Loren: Okay, I've got to ask this question, Chad, because
11:43
it comes to mind
11:46
on, like, I feel like I just keep seeing this again and
11:49
again, and I'm wondering, like, do
11:53
new mainliners, like, folks who
11:56
did not grow up in the mainline tradition,
11:59
like, do they make the best mainliners?
12:02
Does that make sense?
12:03
>> Chad: Like, ah, yeah.
12:05
>> Loren: Like, I had a guy on, hopefully. Um, I'm going to
12:08
remember how to say his name. Drew
12:10
Crosson. I think it is Croson. He's, um,
12:13
Episcopal. Like, you grew up Southern Baptist.
12:16
Now he's planting a church in
12:19
Dallas, kind of big metro area.
12:22
His episode will be a few episodes back. You know, I
12:25
think about myself, if I can speak so highly of myself,
12:28
and. And I'm just curious, like, there does
12:31
seem to be a different kind of energy that
12:34
folks like you and I who grew up outside of the
12:37
tradition. I'm thinking of my good friend and colleague
12:40
Dennis Sanders, who grew up outside
12:43
of mainline Protestantism, and
12:46
for whatever reason or another, found
12:49
a home sometimes, you know,
12:52
most of the time in a mainline Protestant tradition,
12:56
uh, and seem to have a greater. I don't know, maybe this is
12:59
too judgy, but have a real passion for the church because,
13:01
like, because we found it to be a home, but we
13:04
didn't. Like you mentioned, like, it was like your. Your
13:07
family that you. Your long lost family.
13:10
>> Chad: Yeah. You know, I can think. So
13:13
this might be an answer to the question. Um, it might
13:16
not be, but I. A
13:19
few years ago, when the whole,
13:22
um, deconstruction that really kind
13:25
of took over the Internet.
13:27
>> Loren: Yeah.
13:27
>> Chad: In the Christian sphere, I thought it was really interesting
13:30
because, like, I went through some really, really gnarly,
13:33
gnarly stuff 20 years ago.
13:37
Uh, that would probably be called deconstruction
13:39
now.
13:40
>> Loren: Right.
13:41
>> Chad: And I had a lot of other friends that were deep in
13:43
Southern Baptist land that
13:46
had some of the same frustrations and same questions. And
13:49
oddly enough, we're all mainline now.
13:53
And I almost wonder if. If
13:55
we're going to go like super Evangelical, super Baptist
13:58
on this. It's. It's almost like we
14:01
knew we didn't want to become backsliders.
14:04
>> Loren: Right.
14:04
>> Chad: To use that term.
14:06
>> Loren: Right.
14:06
>> Chad: Um, and instead we found
14:09
a home that answered those questions. And so that's a very
14:12
evangelical loaded statement.
14:15
Uh, but I do, I mean, I, I
14:18
spent a lot of time, you know,
14:21
at Asbury with weird Baptist and
14:24
Pentecostals that were considering not just
14:27
mainline, but I mean, a lot of these folks,
14:30
uh, oddly enough, the ones that grew up Pentecostal all either became Roman
14:33
Catholic or Eastern Orthodox.
14:35
>> Loren: Wow.
14:36
>> Chad: And so I do feel like maybe the,
14:39
um, that fierce
14:42
allegiance and belief in the local church
14:45
that you really don't see
14:48
inside of the main line as much
14:51
might be something that
14:54
that's brought to the table.
14:56
>> Loren: Yeah.
14:57
>> Chad: If that makes sense.
14:59
>> Loren: Yeah, yeah. Uh, it's funny you use the word
15:02
backsliding. That's certainly a word that someone who did not grow
15:05
up Baptist probably is. What are you talking about?
15:08
>> Chad: Yeah, there's that great toady song, Backslider. Are you
15:11
old enough to remember the Toadies?
15:12
>> Loren: No.
15:13
>> Chad: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Toadies have a song called Backslider
15:16
and the, the singer of the Toadies was a preacher's kid
15:18
that, that did not stay in the church.
15:22
>> Loren: But, well, see, that's probably why I had not heard of it because I was
15:24
too Baptist to not to probably
15:27
listen to the toadies.
15:29
>> Chad: Also, I'm a little bit older than you. It might, it, uh, might have been.
15:32
They were kind of like a two hit wonder in the mid-90s.
15:35
So.
15:37
>> Loren: You know, Chad, I often lament, I
15:40
think I say this sometimes, you know,
15:42
half serious and half true. Like, I think I, I
15:45
deconstructed, like you said, like 15, 20 years
15:48
too soon.
15:52
You know, I would have been social media star here.
15:55
Um, anyway, we're not here to
15:58
talk about, you know,
16:00
mainliners or former Baptists or deconstruction.
16:03
Ah. As interesting as it is, I want to talk to Chad about
16:06
his book. Is, uh, My Church Healthy?
16:10
And I think Chad, we first kind of encountered one
16:12
another's work on Substack.
16:16
And I was like, oh, this is great. I'm so
16:19
thrilled to see someone who's kind
16:22
of like we talked about, brings that passion and energy and
16:24
evangelism in a mainline
16:27
tradition. And I was thrilled to see it in another mainline
16:30
tradition. And,
16:32
uh, you know, so thrilled to see your work in church,
16:35
new church and church revitalization.
16:38
So let's just kind of. You've already kind of talked a
16:40
little bit about, you know, your current role, um, but
16:43
talk about how your role and your work
16:46
with churches led to putting some stuff down on
16:49
paper into a book.
16:51
>> Chad: Yeah. So it kind of actually goes hand in hand because
16:54
one of the reasons I decided to write the book and then the books
16:57
that I'm, I'm writing right now
17:00
initially because we realized like we go into work
17:03
in these churches here in Louisiana.
17:06
Um, you know, this 90 page book is actually
17:09
saving me like three meetings.
17:13
And, and we were looking at just the cost of
17:15
like, I realized that, you know,
17:18
it's on Amazon, people can buy it on Amazon. But I
17:21
realized like, if I publish this through Amazon self publishing,
17:24
I can get author copies for like $2
17:27
and I can just send this to these churches in
17:29
Louisiana for dirt cheap
17:33
before we start our work together. Because what
17:36
Church Healthy is about is really our, like
17:38
our first meeting, the first conversation we have
17:42
with anybody and where it came from is when I got hired.
17:44
You know, most, most United, uh, Methodist annual conferences
17:48
used to have a role called the congregational developer.
17:51
That was the old job title in the 90s and
17:53
2000s. And when I got hired, they decided
17:56
to retitle our office and retitle
17:59
my role as congregational vitality strategist.
18:03
And I went into my boss, uh, about two
18:06
months into the job and said I've got a problem
18:08
with this word vital because this
18:11
isn't what we have to focus on right now. Like our churches
18:14
are actually very unstable. And
18:17
so we need to think about what it means to bring a church to
18:20
stability. Because this is post Covid. And if you're
18:23
familiar with United Methodist Church, this is post
18:25
disaffiliation 2023.
18:28
>> Loren: Ah, right.
18:28
>> Chad: I mean I, I got hired, I, I m. Started the job
18:31
six months after the final vote from
18:34
exiting churches in the Louisiana Conference.
18:37
Um, and, and, and he,
18:40
I've got an awesome boss, Dr. Van Stinson. And
18:42
he was like, huh, I'm intrigued. Chase the
18:45
rabbit, run the line. And so what it came up with is, you know,
18:48
the history of the word vital and methodism that comes from this
18:51
report. I talk about it in my book that came out in
18:54
2011 where people trying to study healthy churches and it was
18:57
so controversial, it actually got torpedoed
19:00
at the 2012 General Conference.
19:02
>> Loren: Wow.
19:03
>> Chad: So one of our giant governing body, the denomination,
19:05
did this amazing resource project
19:09
that was so threatening and scary, people
19:11
torpedoed him. And when I was coaching, I was
19:14
working for a company that had developed a
19:17
pastoral assessment and coaching program that was based
19:20
off of information from that report on what the
19:22
qualities of a pastor of a vital church were.
19:25
And so I knew that that language
19:28
was really effective and really helpful. So I went back into
19:31
the studies, what they said about actual, the actual churches. And so we came
19:34
up with there's really four stages of
19:37
church. Uh, there's ah, an
19:40
unstable church, a stable church, a vital church
19:43
or a sustainable church. And that
19:45
um, churches are going to fall inside of
19:48
that. And then alongside of those we really began
19:51
developing seven core categories
19:55
uh, of these churches based off what we were seeing
19:58
and what we were hearing from the churches in Louisiana and
20:01
where they were having problems. And the big thing for me
20:04
was we have to measure all these things. I'm a
20:07
measurement and data.
20:08
>> Loren: Mhm.
20:09
>> Chad: And so we have to find a way to measure these things
20:12
but also make it to where congregations can kind of self
20:15
select relatively easily where they feel like they
20:18
might be at the seven core categories of
20:21
member care and relationships, objective measurement,
20:24
objective metric, measurements, financial, health,
20:27
ministry opportunities, new member integration,
20:30
uh, evangelism, and then congregational engagement.
20:33
So we kind of created this big huge grid
20:36
of how a church would
20:38
manifest all seven of those core categories
20:41
alongside of the stages, the
20:44
unstable, stable, vital,
20:46
sustainable. And we created a one page grid
20:49
and uh, we loved it. So we walk into a church, hand them the
20:52
one page grid and their leadership can circle
20:55
like okay, we feel like this is present here at our church, this kind of stuff.
20:59
Um, and so the part of the book was really like, hey, let's just
21:02
speed up our work so we can, you know, better resource
21:05
our churches. And
21:07
um, it's been, it's
21:10
fantastic uh, to see this work
21:13
out, the whole thing. Actually I kind of seeded the content out
21:16
on an email list I have just walking through each of the
21:18
seven core categories and I was getting feedback back and forth
21:21
and back and forth from people in the email list. And that's when I realized like,
21:24
okay, this might be helpful because it
21:27
really, it's just that question like is my church healthy?
21:30
Typically healthy churches aren't going to ask that question.
21:33
>> Loren: Right.
21:34
>> Chad: Churches that are worried about things are going to ask that question.
21:37
And what I appreciate it is, is
21:39
vitality does not exist on a linear spectrum.
21:43
Church can fall all over this grid. I mean I've had,
21:46
I've seen some really, really unhealthy churches
21:49
absolutely, like justify being in the sustainable
21:51
category for one of those poor categories.
21:54
And so it just
21:57
so much of how I do development and with not just this
22:00
book, with the books that are coming out later on in the year it's about
22:02
eliminating the anxiety behind people. They have stuff to
22:05
work on and let's get to kind of tangible, tactical
22:08
things, uh, that are easy to do.
22:11
And if somebody's familiar with adaptive technical
22:14
paradigm, um, is break this down
22:17
into technical skills because 9 times out of 10 getting from
22:20
unstable to stable is absolutely technical.
22:24
You don't have to hit the tough stuff necessarily.
22:29
>> Loren: Yeah.
22:29
I think what was most interesting to me about your
22:32
matrix is that I think most
22:35
people would just automatically assume like a big church is a,
22:38
is a great church, is a healthy church
22:42
and a small church is not a healthy church.
22:45
>> Chad: Yeah.
22:45
>> Loren: Talk through how your matrix kind of flips those narratives.
22:48
>> Chad: Yeah, so that's a, that's, that's a passion of mine.
22:52
Um, um, you know the last, the last church I served at my little
22:54
tiny preaching assignment, quartertime appointment,
22:58
uh, 17 people on a Sunday
23:00
morning would uh,
23:03
score pretty well on the vitality matrix. Now
23:06
the, the congregational engagement and the
23:09
evangelism stuff like ah, they, they're not very, doing very good
23:11
at that. Like they had four years of money in the bank
23:15
and now you might say a church of 16 or 18 people,
23:17
isn't that uh, that effective?
23:20
Well, they're in a, they're in a municipality of like
23:23
1500 people.
23:24
>> Loren: Yeah.
23:25
>> Chad: So like in the book I talk a little bit about missional saturation.
23:28
Like their missional saturation number was higher than
23:30
average for Louisiana. Um, whereas
23:33
like I had a, and I doubt anybody's going to hear
23:36
it from there, but like I had an incident at my dad's
23:39
church two years ago where I, I showed up to a men's ministry
23:43
event that was going to be like a multi, like multi week thing.
23:46
And uh, I signed up, paid my $20.
23:49
Nobody knew who I was. I've not been here in 25 years.
23:52
Gave him my, my tech, my phone number for text messages, all this kind
23:55
of stuff. I never showed up again because it was at 5 o' clock on Friday mornings and
23:58
I'm not going to do that. And I never heard back,
24:03
like, never heard anything. It was like wow, like
24:06
y' all are a really, really big church. But I
24:09
mean apparently Yalls new person
24:11
systems aren't good enough to catch. Hey, why this person?
24:14
I mean this, there's 300 guys there. I mean this
24:17
is larger than 95 of the church, the
24:20
Methodist churches in Louisiana.
24:22
>> Loren: Right.
24:22
>> Chad: Uh, and so, and you know, other times like we've, I've got a church,
24:25
I'm working with some right now that 20 years ago was 1800
24:28
people. And it's now like 70.
24:31
And so that's it really. I mean, you can have a
24:34
really, really healthy small church that terribly,
24:38
you know, and we're not talking about morals or anything like
24:41
that. We're talking about just operations.
24:42
>> Loren: Right.
24:43
>> Chad: Can be really unhealthy. And I think with bigger
24:45
churches especially, one of the big issues is,
24:48
um, like I've got this kind of quick
24:51
description. I'll say there's three kinds of churches that grow. There's the
24:54
big church down the street, there's the intentionally
24:57
evangelistic church, and there's the church that has to grow or it's going to
25:00
die. One of the difficulties of the big church down
25:03
the street is just the churn. I mean, they're going to see, they're, they're
25:06
a tractor beam for the community. They see
25:08
so many new people. They can actually do a really bad
25:11
job at integration.
25:14
>> Loren: Right.
25:14
>> Chad: But just the law of, the law of ratios is going to keep them ahead
25:18
of the curve, if that makes sense.
25:20
>> Loren: Yeah, yeah.
25:21
>> Chad: Uh, it really is. It's not healthy.
25:24
Has nothing to do with size. But there's things that you can
25:27
measure to understand this. I'll talk about.
25:31
>> Loren: Yeah, I'm m glad you make that point about the three kind of churches that will grow.
25:36
Um, yeah,
25:39
I think it was McIntosh. Gary
25:41
McIntosh. Have you read him? He talks about like,
25:45
this has been a number of years ago, but he talks
25:48
similarly. A church based
25:51
on its ratio against versus
25:54
other churches in the society are going to have that much
25:56
bigger of a, uh. Magnetism.
25:58
>> Chad: Yes.
26:00
>> Loren: So it's like you say, like folks are going to keep
26:03
coming just because of the gravitational pull to some
26:05
churches.
26:07
>> Chad: I understand some of that because my, the, the town I
26:10
pastored in for almost 15 years in North
26:13
Louisiana, Monroe, West Monroe. Most people would
26:15
recognize it because, uh, Duck Dynasty
26:18
was in west. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
26:21
Well, we'll make, we'll make the same noises. Um, but like
26:25
the population of those two, those two cities combined
26:28
is like 65,000. But West
26:30
Monroe, the other side of the river than I ever lived,
26:33
15,000, 20,000. And they had
26:35
probably three or four churches that averaged over
26:38
1500 on a Sunday morning.
26:40
>> Loren: Wow.
26:41
>> Chad: Uh, I mean, it's a, the religious landscape of that area is really
26:44
interesting. Um, and you got this magnetism
26:47
like that. You know, certain churches are going to, they get to a point
26:50
where they're just a tractor being for people who
26:52
randomly decide I'm going to start going to church. Well, I'm going to go to the
26:56
giant one I drive by all the time that has billboards
26:58
all over town, just name recognition. Um, that,
27:01
that's a very real thing. And uh, I talk,
27:04
I, I, some, I talk about what I call
27:07
hard edge churches versus soft edge churches.
27:11
And you know that large churches are typically pretty
27:14
hard edged. Um, you know,
27:17
you're going to get the same experience
27:19
at two or three of them that you can get anywhere else. They're
27:22
going to sing the same songs. They're reading this.
27:24
>> Loren: Yeah.
27:25
>> Chad: For people. They're, they all have
27:28
like, they, they, they, they all have the big signs out front. Hey,
27:31
great to see you here. This generic, not a
27:33
negative sense, but like it's fairly generic.
27:36
>> Loren: Right.
27:36
>> Chad: Um, and those types of those churches as
27:39
hard aged churches like that, um, it can be really
27:42
difficult if you're in a solid, smaller local
27:44
church and you're struggling because
27:48
uh, you're just wondering where are people
27:52
and why aren't they coming to our church? And it has nothing to do
27:55
with you being good or bad at stuff.
27:58
>> Loren: I think this gets into another point you
28:01
make in the book that I thought was excellent. I want to see if I can find the quote
28:04
here. You talk about critical mass. You
28:07
say critical mass is having the right size of people for your ministry,
28:10
uh, approach to be useful and compelling. Attempting to be too big
28:13
of a ministry is awkward and exhausting. Leverage
28:16
your normal sized church, uh, leverage
28:19
your normal sized church attributes. So if you have five, seven
28:22
children, don't like make an entire wing and said,
28:25
what is the appropriate ministry we can do with five, seven
28:27
children. That might not get done in a larger setting
28:30
because it goes back to this point about that
28:33
magnetism of the big church, like small
28:35
churches. I'm sure you've seen this. Like I have. It's like, oh, we
28:38
need to replicate what they have. And you say,
28:41
like make sure your ministry is right sized
28:44
to your ministry context.
28:48
>> Chad: Yeah, yeah. So it's, I mean it,
28:51
it's, I think that we have this tension
28:54
point that if,
28:56
if all churches saying, and I love how we're
28:59
pulling into this piece,
29:03
um, you know, they're going to
29:06
think, okay, we can't have youth ministry
29:09
unless we have the same type of youth ministry that the big
29:11
church down the street does. But
29:15
you know, a, you don't have the resources and the ability to
29:18
do that. But then also like you might be
29:21
able to do things that that big church down the street would
29:24
love to be able to do in a relational level, in
29:27
a relational dynamic. And, and to,
29:29
to, to M. Ms. M. That is missing a
29:32
huge opportunity. So Instead you, you need
29:35
to scale up. Like, hey, um, I got talk about
29:38
percentage based based metrics. Uh, a lot in the book
29:41
is, you know, hey, we're a church of 30.
29:44
You know, having five middle school and high
29:47
schoolers in a church of 30 is actually a really solid
29:50
number. So what do we do to have great
29:53
ministry for five middle
29:56
or high schoolers rather than feeling
29:58
like we're doing a bad job because we don't have 70
30:02
that the church down the street has, but The Church of Seventy, the church
30:05
that has 70 down the street is running like
30:07
600 on Sunday morning. And at
30:10
that size, you know, 70 might not even be the healthiest thing for them.
30:17
>> Loren: Yeah, I think that's a great point, and I'm glad you put that in the
30:19
book.
30:20
I think this gets to another point of being an
30:23
awareness of your data. You write about how
30:26
it's impersonal not to track data, which again, I think
30:29
maybe, uh, maybe in my neck of the woods, this
30:32
is, you know, something,
30:35
something that mainliners are more comfortable with than your
30:38
neck of the woods. But, um, talk
30:41
about why tracking data on people
30:44
is helpful and meaningful. Really.
30:47
>> Chad: Yeah. So, you know, I'm noticing that
30:50
data is this thing that,
30:53
you know, we don't, we don't talk about it enough. And when
30:56
we do talk about it, we feel really icky
30:59
about it. And in some ways, I think the
31:02
way that the mainline church deals with data,
31:05
um, it, it might be indicative
31:08
of the larger decline that we
31:11
have experienced over the last 30 or 40 years.
31:14
And I kind of make this tongue in cheek joke about it to,
31:17
to explain, you know, what happened is, is,
31:20
um, you know, if you're Catholic, you want people to know that you're not
31:23
Protestant. And if you're in the mainline, you
31:26
often want people to know you're not Baptist. And if
31:29
you're right, you want people to know you're not Pentecostal.
31:31
And if you're Pentecostal, you want everybody to know you are
31:34
Pentecostal. And I've been in all four of those kinds
31:37
of churches, so I can say that. Um, but anyway, like, you know,
31:40
for.
31:40
>> Loren: I mean, I think the only way it's changed now is mainliners
31:43
want people to know they're not evangelical.
31:45
>> Chad: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. And I'm in the Deep South. When you say
31:48
Baptist, everybody knows you're talking about. But okay, sure, I've
31:51
shared that with folks in different parts of the country. They say that exact
31:54
same thing.
31:55
>> Loren: Right.
31:55
>> Chad: When in reality, you know, they're. There are
31:58
theological differences between those four spectrums.
32:01
>> Loren: Mhm.
32:02
>> Chad: But as far as the congregations operationally or
32:05
organized in a healthy way, that's not a theological issue.
32:08
And I do feel like there's a lot of stuff that
32:11
the main line just missed in the
32:14
last 10 or 15 years that we
32:16
don't do because that's what the Baptists or the
32:19
evangelicals do. I was digging around
32:22
earlier today. I was going through, um, I
32:25
found this tiny little green 3 by 5 index
32:27
card that was put out by the,
32:30
the Methodist Church, so 1939 to
32:33
1968. And it was literally like you could order
32:36
a block of a thousand of these things and create a 3 by
32:38
5 index card church database.
32:42
>> Loren: Wow.
32:43
>> Chad: And I've cleaned out a lot of closed churches. Whenever I go
32:46
into a church, I'm just, I'm um, I've never seen
32:49
this before. And one of the things I got
32:51
talk about in the book a lot, um, is like you need
32:54
a church database. You need a modern church database because it's, it's,
32:57
it is a ministry tool. And
33:00
the amount of larger
33:03
mainline churches. So in the main line, a church
33:06
of 200 is considered a large church. They really
33:09
don't anything like. It blows my mind.
33:12
And I get that numbers are icky and people are
33:15
trying to make this case. And I saved two articles this morning
33:17
for people talking about how
33:20
to uh, uh, why does
33:23
Sunday morning attendance matter or anything?
33:26
And we're still inside. Hey, every, those are people a,
33:29
like Jesus calls us to go reach people. Uh, we
33:32
need to be good stewards of what we have been given.
33:35
And if we're not really good stewards of people, there might
33:38
be, you know, there's, there's, there's, there's
33:40
complications that are there. And then
33:43
also something I didn't talk about in the book that much. Um, I'm
33:46
talking about a lot. My next book is, you know, for me, Sunday morning
33:49
worship attendance is not the end all be
33:52
all metric. But what it's very helpful for
33:55
is if you imagine back into old cartoons, you had
33:57
the old timey surveyors,
34:00
we like pounded the big stake in the ground and then pulled the chain off
34:03
to measure against. For me,
34:06
there's no better measurement stake
34:10
than Sunday morning worship attendance. And it's helpful
34:13
to have that to understand. Oh, how are you doing
34:16
in your discipleship ministries? Like I talk about in the book
34:19
a lot, like what are healthy percentages based on your church?
34:22
Um, it's like I talked about earlier, like, you know, for a church of
34:25
35, middle school and high schoolers is a
34:28
solid number to have, you know, measuring those sorts
34:31
of things. And so I think ultimately we have to care about people and if we
34:33
care about our churches. Um, you know, this isn't about,
34:36
you know, bragging rights or anything. It's about
34:39
sustainability. Like, you have to have people in the church
34:42
to keep the building open. And a lot of, A lot of
34:45
the thrust of this book and the conversations I've had with people
34:48
about it is, um, like this
34:50
book is written for people that are nervous their church is about to have to
34:53
close.
34:56
And what can we do to get you stable?
34:59
I really don't talk that much in the book about moving
35:02
from stable to vital or hardly at all from
35:05
vitals to sustainable. Like, I really try to focus the book
35:08
of, of what does it mean to move from unstable to state.
35:12
>> Loren: Hmm. Yeah.
35:15
Do you want to talk, do you want to talk a little bit through that? A little bit
35:18
here? Just what are some of those first key steps
35:21
from moving from
35:25
stable or. I'm sorry, I'm saying it backwards. Say it how you
35:28
say it again.
35:28
>> Chad: Yeah, to move from unstable to stable.
35:31
Yeah.
35:32
So, um, so, so it with the book. Like, this is
35:35
a, this is a resourcing thing for me. I'm passionate about
35:37
resourcing pastors. I give away a
35:40
pretty, you know, solid amount of, uh, some
35:43
free digital tools. And you get the book, you can get, you know, your
35:46
own one, uh, page.
35:50
Uh, you know, pass the, pass the sheet out,
35:53
you know, sit down with your leadership and say, hey, just kind of curious, like, where
35:55
does this go? Look, uh, through the one, the one page
35:58
sheet. I offer a more complicated solution to it that I
36:01
honestly think is too complicated. Just go for the one page
36:04
solution. Do the one page thing. Nine times out of
36:07
ten, what I find is a couple of
36:09
things. Uh, one, very rarely are these churches,
36:12
so the objective metric measurements, like, they're not,
36:15
they're not doing that at all. I just kind of have
36:18
to help you establish a baseline. You want to understand a
36:21
baseline? Also give away a, uh, an
36:24
Excel spreadsheet that's a metric calculator
36:27
that has a lot of these percentage pieces built in. So,
36:30
hey, let's go in, let's fill in our Sunday attendance. Let's
36:32
fill in. How many visitors do we have this month? How many
36:35
kids do we have? How many youth? How many adults
36:38
in discipleship? How many people serving, how many. How many people
36:41
giving? And it spits out
36:44
automatically for you, these, those percentages.
36:47
Um, I've never worked with a church that's
36:50
struggling That I might. That's in the vital or
36:52
sustainable category for metric measurement.
36:56
And very rarely are they even in the stable category.
36:59
And so I think that is just. So it kind of circles back
37:02
with the last piece. Like what do we do about data? It's like this is,
37:05
this is the beginning point because it helps you set goals
37:09
and to keep goal setting, percentage based thing. I also
37:11
think congregational engagement, that first core category.
37:15
And um, it's almost like a cousin with the
37:18
member, the ministry opportunities as well.
37:21
Because that's where the discipleship stuff really goes into. It
37:23
is a lot of churches and I found it mainline
37:26
churches. And it might. This might be another one of those, hey, we're not
37:29
evangelical. Is no
37:32
discipleship and relationships are huge.
37:36
And a lot of times what I'm finding out is even the internal
37:39
piece of the church is not
37:42
doing that well for those who are not maybe in
37:44
the immediate like first couple of circles of
37:47
involvement. So outside of your like
37:50
leadership team and the people that are there every single
37:53
Sunday no matter what, a lot of times that
37:55
outer edge is there
37:58
barely. Um, I think I talk
38:01
about in the book how we found in Louisiana, so many of our churches are
38:04
actually significantly larger than they are on Sunday
38:07
morning. And it's that gap
38:10
between like, uh, the little. The little last church I
38:13
served, I loved, I learned. Uh, so much of that church is built into these books
38:15
I'm writing right now. No, they ran 18 or 19 on Sunday
38:18
morning, I think when I was there. And I did
38:21
kind of like a really analog
38:25
idea of capturing their active adults.
38:28
And there's over 40. And I was like, y', all half of the
38:31
church is not actually that active in the
38:34
church. Yeah, like we could grow our attendance.
38:37
Like we could beat where they were in 2019 if we
38:40
just engage the people that already call this their church.
38:43
>> Loren: Right.
38:44
>> Chad: And so that, that's the stuff I think is really, uh, that's what I see
38:47
changes the most because like you get that kind of stuff under control.
38:50
A lot of times your financial reality is going
38:53
to begin increasing. People, uh, are gonna be
38:56
excited about what's going on at the church. They're gonna start inviting their friends.
38:58
You're gonna have to figure out what to do with new people
39:01
because new people are coming. It's really
39:04
that, that core category of, you know,
39:06
the, the member care and relationships,
39:09
congregational engagement, objective metric
39:12
measurements that seem to be the biggest game changers.
39:17
>> Loren: Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that again. I'm thinking, uh, I think this is
39:20
Tom Rainier, or maybe he just says it someone else says it like
39:23
it's the cliche, like what you measure grows.
39:26
Right?
39:26
>> Chad: Yeah, yeah. There's so many versions of that. Yeah.
39:29
>> Loren: Right. So I think it's important just to,
39:32
to have some sense of what you're keeping track of. So I'm glad you're
39:35
mentioning that.
39:36
>> Chad: And with that, if you're not measuring anything, then nothing's probably
39:38
growing.
39:41
>> Loren: Right.
39:41
>> Chad: Because I mean I don't.
39:43
So, so, so you were part of the doc for a long time,
39:46
right?
39:46
>> Loren: Right.
39:47
>> Chad: You all had to submit an annual report, right?
39:50
>> Loren: Mhm.
39:51
>> Chad: I think a lot of times in the Main Line most people don't look at
39:54
these numbers until they do their yearly report.
39:57
>> Loren: Right. I could see that.
39:59
>> Chad: And then depending on your structure,
40:03
you don't have an easy way to pull out
40:06
multiple years of those same things.
40:10
Um, the United Methodist Church has a tool called um, um
40:12
data.org and it's not been updated in a couple of years. It takes a few
40:15
years to get updated. But I've never. But you can, you
40:18
can find out a handful of key information points on every single United
40:21
Methodist Church in the country. I've not found one of those for
40:24
other mainline denominations. I've looked for them but I've
40:27
not found them.
40:28
>> Loren: Um, yeah,
40:31
the Episcopal Church has really good data I think
40:34
the UCC I think has been pretty
40:37
good about data keeping. But I know like the
40:39
doc, we're using a lot of like slang here for our
40:42
non mainline friends.
40:43
>> Chad: Yeah.
40:44
>> Loren: But the doc has not been great about data
40:47
collection historically.
40:48
>> Chad: And what I've seen is, you know, a lot of the mainline is good
40:51
at uh, good at keeping this stuff. But for
40:54
any random person to access it in an
40:57
accessible way and to pull back, oh sure, that's what you
41:00
can't find. And a lot of
41:03
churches don't even realize, hey, let's look at our worst attendance for
41:06
the last 10 years. Like what can we tell?
41:08
>> Loren: Right.
41:09
>> Chad: Sunday school attendance, like that's the thing, it's not necessarily worth it. Let's
41:12
look at Sunday school, let's look at giving units like
41:15
these sort of data points and let's, let's look at these and
41:18
not just look at them in a 10 year pullback. But hey,
41:22
let's look at these things every month
41:25
and realize when we might have a problem
41:29
45 days after the problem happened. Not
41:32
10 months or five years.
41:37
>> Loren: Yeah, yeah. Because even
41:40
doing like a 10 year survey of giving
41:43
and attendance and some of those more basic metrics, you
41:46
can be like. Because you know, I think uh,
41:49
what often Happens, Right. Chad, you've probably seen this is like,
41:52
you know, you lose a few people
41:55
last year and the year before and the year before. And you know, what was
41:58
a congregation? You know, it's like
42:01
the Baptist church that I grew up in. Right.
42:04
Was when I was a teenager, like 120, 125,
42:07
like the kind of classic mid sized church. And now it's like
42:10
60, 65. And it's nothing like dramatic. It's just kind
42:13
of this slow. Lose a
42:16
few people here and there and if you're not really paying attention,
42:19
it's like, whoa, what happened? But if you're
42:22
not, if you don't look at that, it's just kind of like, oh
42:25
yeah, we're smaller than we used to be.
42:28
>> Chad: Right? Yeah, yeah.
42:30
And it's. And it's, you know, Covid. Yeah, Covid
42:33
happened. Um, as a data nerd,
42:36
Covid's actually fascinating to me because it was a giant reset
42:39
button for every church in the country.
42:41
M. But. But also
42:44
just
42:45
uh,
42:50
you know, realizing what does it mean
42:55
to be able to accurately kind of say where you're
42:58
at? Does seem.
43:01
And then also like one of the things like you just brought up, like, you know,
43:04
like now I've got, I have like a fourth layer
43:07
down from this that we use in Louisiana.
43:09
Uh, we'll go. Okay, how many? Because we have to report all this. I can find it. I
43:12
don't have to call a pastor to get this information. I can get it in our yearly, uh,
43:15
reports. Uh, okay. How many deaths do they have?
43:18
Okay, well, hey, your worship declined by 12 people
43:21
last year, but the pastor buried 20 people.
43:25
>> Loren: Right.
43:26
>> Chad: Uh, so. So learning to look at those third and fourth.
43:29
Fourth layer things really, really matters a lot.
43:32
If you're in this situation, you're trying to get a clear picture of
43:35
what's actually going on.
43:38
Yeah.
43:38
>> Loren: I'm glad you, I'm glad you brought the desk because that's one. Like,
43:41
again, like you could be working your butt off,
43:44
uh, you know, being very intentional about evangelism, to use your
43:47
word. But if you're not, you know, if you're burying like you
43:50
said, 20, 30 people a year, like, that's a hard,
43:53
you know.
43:55
>> Chad: Yeah. Yeah. And what's is me as a
43:57
denominational officer now, I feel it's my responsibility
44:00
to beat that drum when other people start asking. M like, yeah, okay, yeah, they
44:03
decline. Let's look at me deaths they had.
44:06
>> Loren: Mhm.
44:06
>> Chad: Because like we've got a church in our conference that's doing
44:09
fantastic that you
44:11
Know, even before COVID
44:14
was declining pretty significantly.
44:18
But you got me funerals, they had a year, and
44:21
then you have new members they took in, and they
44:24
were always outpaced. They could never outpace
44:27
the deaths with new members. And
44:30
we're talking a church that dealt with a lot of these every
44:33
year. And what's so interesting is,
44:36
um, I saw Ryan Berge do
44:39
something similar with one of the Lutheran denominations. But
44:42
I started tracking, uh, for churches that I
44:45
knew had been declining prior to Covid, I
44:47
tracked their average decline rate from
44:49
like2013
44:52
or 14 to 2020 and came up with an
44:55
aggregate like they were declining 8% a year.
44:58
And so I ran looking at their 2019
45:01
attendance. Okay, let's do an 8% decline
45:03
all the way to 2024. And then I, uh, made another
45:06
curve of their actual attendance starting in 2020.
45:09
And what's so funny is I'm finding a handful of churches that
45:12
the COVID reset actually helped the church. And they
45:15
are larger now than where they statistically
45:18
might have been if they continue the same.
45:21
>> Loren: Interesting.
45:24
Yeah, interesting. Covid really
45:27
was a, really was a turning point here for so many
45:29
churches, uh, in some good and bad ways, I
45:32
suppose.
45:34
I do want to ask you before we take a break, this is kind of off
45:37
topic, but you talk about it briefly in the book
45:39
and I feel like it's such an interesting
45:42
thing that I want to hear, hear more about it. You talk about
45:45
ministries of Mercy and Justice vs
45:48
Ministries of Mission and evangelism in
45:50
mainline churches. So do you want to talk a little bit about that
45:53
here?
45:54
>> Chad: Uh, yeah, I'll try to do it a little bit.
45:56
Um, so really what that came from was
45:59
me thinking we've kind of,
46:01
we. We use all four of those words almost for the
46:04
same thing sometimes.
46:08
Or like, I'll have churches, hey, we do tons of ministries of mercy and
46:11
just. But no justice. But nobody ever comes to church.
46:14
And you'll have sometimes, well meaning, more seasoned
46:17
saints, like, let's shut down the food pantry, because none of those
46:20
folks ever come to church. And so we have this
46:23
weird, like, put together of all of them.
46:26
And what I've been thinking about a lot lately, and
46:29
a lot of this comes from the work of Leslie Newbegin, is
46:32
this idea that m. The mission of the church
46:36
is the very distinct call we're
46:39
given in Matthew 28.
46:42
This is what we are called to do, and that
46:45
evangelism, mercy
46:48
and justice are all three separate
46:51
enterprises in relationship to the expanding
46:54
kingdom of God, and that we perhaps
46:57
need to think of all four of those as separate things
47:00
again, inside of their specific place.
47:03
So, like, I think I have a quote in the book. Don't be a community center. Be a
47:05
church. Like, yeah, you're a church.
47:08
I, I used to have a mentor pastor that would always say
47:11
this was a very justice oriented church in
47:14
a really bad neighborhood in a major city. We
47:17
had tons of this kind of stuff. But he'd always say, y' all remember the
47:20
church of Satan can have a coat drive.
47:24
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Hey, no, be in the church.
47:28
Like you're different. You're the only uniquely
47:30
different entity inside of humanity.
47:36
>> Loren: Well, this is good conversation. Uh, let's take
47:39
a quick break. The book is again, is your
47:42
church healthy? So I guess you can get on Amazon,
47:45
right?
47:45
>> Chad: Yep. It's the only place that's available is Amazon.
47:48
>> Loren: So, yeah, only places available. Okay. I
47:51
guess, I guess I'm kind of at a word, uh, out of order
47:53
here. Let's plug that later. But you know, my kid is, uh, if you
47:56
can't tell, uh, hungry.
47:58
>> Chad: Bagel. Uh, bagel pretty bad.
48:00
>> Loren: He wants a bagel. Let's take
48:02
a quick break and we'll come back with some closing questions.
48:08
All right, we're back with Reverend Chad Brooks and. Ah,
48:11
Chad, some closing questions. You can take these as seriously
48:14
or not as you'd like to. If you're pumped for a
48:17
day. What does that day look like for you?
48:19
>> Chad: Okay, this is a. That was a wild one, man. I like that.
48:22
Um, so as if I'm going to pretend that I
48:25
am a theological Wesleyan Pope.
48:28
>> Loren: Okay. Um, okay.
48:32
>> Chad: Methodism took the bank, took the class meetings
48:35
out of the requirements and measurements for local church in the
48:37
1930s. The band meetings never
48:40
really kicked on that hard in America.
48:43
That was a lot of. That was a British
48:46
phenomena. I would put the band and the class
48:49
meetings back at the forefront of the operation of the church.
48:53
>> Loren: Okay. Yeah.
48:57
Okay. How about this? A theologian or
48:59
historical Christian figure you'd want to meet or bring back
49:02
to life.
49:04
>> Chad: I would love to sit down and meet AW
49:06
Tozer, because the further I get away
49:09
from my 20s, the more I realize how much of a theological
49:12
influence he was on my life. I also fully expected
49:15
that he would chastise me deeply
49:19
about things, but I would still. Yeah, I just
49:22
that, you know, he, he seemed to bridge the gap
49:25
between so many different theological spectrums. No,
49:28
he. You couldn't pick it down as a
49:31
Calvinist or an Arminianist. Um, you know,
49:34
he wasn't evangelical, he wasn't
49:36
fundamentalist. He wasn't in that
49:39
kind of era, a classic liberal.
49:43
I mean you couldn't peg the guy down,
49:45
um, and just
49:48
I continue to read him like crazy fine
49:51
sermons, that kind of stuff. I would love to have a sit
49:54
down with Aw tozer.
49:58
>> Loren: That's good.
49:59
What do you think history will remember from our current time and
50:02
place?
50:02
>> Chad: I think that at this point I think what's important because I
50:05
know, I love how you, your emphasis on the future church.
50:10
I think that if we look at all of the issues of the
50:13
last 20, 30 years,
50:16
that we have a little bit of,
50:20
uh, false pride that we are the end all, be
50:23
all of things. And I think
50:26
that what the future, I think will remember about
50:29
us is that we're actually on the cusp of something
50:32
that's probably going to take a couple of hundred years to sort
50:35
out.
50:37
>> Loren: Yeah.
50:38
>> Chad: And that, that we are still in the
50:41
infancy stages of how people are
50:44
going to talk about that era.
50:47
And I try to remember that to not get too,
50:50
you know, spun up over things and to
50:53
try to always be, you know, very generous
50:57
and to, to be able to live in multiple places with
50:59
multiple groups of people and that sort of thing thinking
51:02
that like, you know, I, I, I don't, I don't want to be
51:05
arrogant and feel like we're, I'm going to figure everything
51:08
out, that this is just the beginning of something
51:11
that will take a very long time to sort
51:14
out.
51:16
>> Loren: Yeah, that's a good answer. I appreciate that.
51:18
Um, what are your hopes for the future of Christianity?
51:22
>> Chad: I think it's important for us to realize that we are always called
51:25
to be at the margins and that
51:28
uh, you know, the, the last
51:31
few hundred years, you know, of Christendom
51:34
was really this attempt to put Christianity as like the
51:37
governing dynamic of the entire Western social
51:39
order. Uh, uh, I'm a, I'm a big Charles
51:42
Taylor fan and we just look at, at how
51:46
post Reformation, really, before the
51:48
Reformation, but especially post Reformation, like the various strains
51:51
of church were trying to do civic work.
51:54
Um, you know, we have to deal with that
51:57
tension, it not being at the center of all things. I talked about the
52:00
last one. Big, uh, Augustine fan, City of
52:03
God. Uh, the book that made me fall in love with City of
52:06
God was Baptists. Ah. A weird Baptist From
52:08
Baylor about 20 years ago named Barry Harvey wrote a book
52:11
called Another City. Uh, that
52:14
really goes into that stuff as well. I think we also,
52:17
uh, for, and this might be kind of a combination of the last of
52:20
both these last two questions. You know, it's been almost
52:23
a thousand Years since the center of world Christianity has not been
52:26
in the West.
52:28
>> Loren: Yeah.
52:29
>> Chad: And for, for us to, you know, back that kind of arrogant
52:32
piece. It's like, you know, hey, you know, the global
52:35
Pentecostal movement, South America, Africa
52:38
and Asia is doing, I mean, massive things.
52:40
I think. I'm not a missiologist, but friends, uh, that
52:43
are. And I think I want to say, I heard even when say like
52:46
for the first time also, we don't have just one global
52:49
center of Christianity. We've got
52:52
several of them and none of them are
52:55
white. None of them
52:58
are in the west or in the Western, uh,
53:01
in the Northern hemisphere. You know, you got some that are
53:04
down in South America. I just think it's, it's important
53:07
for us to realize that we're not the end all, be all and that, you
53:10
know, the hopes of the future church is that we, we
53:12
become comfortable at the margins again because
53:15
we realize that's what we're called to be.
53:18
>> Loren: Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is great. I
53:21
really appreciate your conversation, your perspectives.
53:24
Share how I kind of blew it already, but
53:27
share how folks can connect with you. Get a copy of the book, all.
53:30
>> Chad: That so you can get the book on Amazon. It's the only place it is.
53:33
Did uh, it through Amazon KDP Publishing, which sidebar.
53:36
I think everybody should self publish right now. I love
53:39
it. Uh, you think you need to do it? Um, um, yeah,
53:42
I feel like we.
53:43
>> Loren: Should have talked about that for the episode but.
53:45
>> Chad: Well, we can do that but later on. But
53:47
um, you know, I'm everywhere at Rev Chad
53:50
Bru, so all the socials. If I have an
53:53
account that's under Rev Chad Brooks,
53:56
um, I really don't do this kind of stuff on Facebook.
54:00
Uh, but you know, Twitter or substack. I
54:03
will have this kind of conversation with folks all day long.
54:06
I um, really badly Manage Rev Chad
54:08
Brooks.com like it's their
54:12
but it's not as good as it should be. And so you
54:15
know, find me, find me on Twitter, find me on substack, uh, or
54:17
YouTube @revchadbrooks.
54:20
>> Loren: Awesome. Well, really appreciate the conversation.
54:23
Want to recommend the book to folks and uh,
54:26
yeah, I mean I really think like your tool is
54:29
a really helpful tool for churches to consider
54:32
and evaluate themselves from.
54:35
I think like you said, many churches are going to be
54:37
pleasantly surprised where they land and
54:40
find some real opportunities for themselves in a
54:43
way that's sustainable and practical.
54:46
So thanks for the conversation.
54:48
>> Chad: Thank you so much.
54:49
>> Loren: Appreciate the book.
54:49
>> Chad: Uh, I will say this, it's the first of four
54:52
that are coming out in the next year that are all
54:55
in the same vein. Um, I'm finishing up the rough draft
54:58
on the next one probably in the next week and a half and it's
55:01
called establishing a growth game plan and
55:04
so awesome. I kind of live and breathe normal sized
55:06
church health and so.
55:08
>> Loren: Okay, we'll have to do it again then.
55:10
>> Chad: Yeah.
55:11
>> Loren: Yeah. Well, uh, we always leave folks with the word of peace, so may
55:14
God's peace be with you.
55:15
>> Chad: Thanks so much.
55:24
Thanks for joining us on the Future Christian Podcast.
55:26
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55:29
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>> Loren: Thanks.
55:52
>> Chad: And go in PE.