Transcript: A Strong Church Reputation Can Hide Staff Culture Problems // Tim McConnell, First Pres

Tim: Everyone around me is trying to tell me it’s okay, and everyone in the congregation wants it to be okay, and everyone in the city wants it to be okay, and we all want it to be okay, but there was something that was not – that was not okay.

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Narrator: This is the Called to Flourish podcast, where leaders and cultures grow.

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Robert: Hello and welcome to the Called to Flourish podcast, where leaders and cultures grow. My name is Robert Wachter. I’m the Vice President of Sales and Marketing here at Best Christian Workplaces. Today we’re joined by Pastor Tim McConnell. He’s the lead pastor of First Pres Church in Colorado Springs. He’s also a former US Army Reserve Chaplain and author of Happy Church: Pursuing Radical Joy as the People of God. Welcome to the podcast, Tim. Could you introduce yourself a little bit more? Tell us about you and your church.

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Tim: Well, Robert, thank you for having me. It’s a great honor to be part of this podcast and hoping to encourage others to understand what kind of a gift your ministry is. I’ve been Pastor of First Pres in Colorado Springs for 10 years and grew up here in Colorado Springs and was really just overjoyed when God called me back to my hometown to serve the church here. First Pres is a church of 154 years of gospel ministry. I’m the 15^th Lead Pastor of this church, and so we’ve got a long history of impact on Colorado Springs and continuing in strength. We have the privilege of being one of the central strong churches of our city, and we’ve got a long, and by God’s grace, impact on life in this city. Our latest journey is, as we’ll talk about, has been about - can we be healthy at the core as people step forward to put on a nametag and serve Jesus here. So just thanks so much for having me.

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Robert: You bet. Remind me, how many years have you been – when did you start as Lead Pastor at the church?

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Tim: Yeah. I came to First Pres in Colorado Springs in 2016. I had been Pastor of a church in Atlanta, north metro Atlanta, for just about five and a half years, and got the call to explore this with the Lord and come out here and lead First Pres. And before that I was an Army Chaplain in the Reserves. I was a Campus Minister at UVA for Graduate Ministries. I worked at a place called the Center For Christian Study. I did a lot of academic work. I’ve got a PhD at UVA, but had not ever been in a place really of being the key leader of a large Christian organization, so at 43 years old the Lord called me to be the Lead Pastor of this big old church here in Colorado Springs and I had an awful lot to learn.

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Robert: Yeah. Well, that’s what we want to talk about, and what I’m interested in is your story. You’ve been working with Best Christian Workplaces for a few years now, specifically about the long history. You talked about how long you’re an established, staple church ministry church in the area and you know, you’re making a difference and the church has made a difference for many, many years, but I’m intrigued by this idea of a church being effective in terms of its mission to some degree, but also not necessarily being completely healthy on the inside, and that’s what I want to explore, you know. When you came onboard as the Senior Leader there, could you sense that there was something internally going on that needed to change, but you maybe didn’t fully understand it, couldn’t put your finger on exactly what it was, but you sort of sensed, maybe something needs to be fixed here, and what do I do about it? Tell us about that kind of experience that you had.

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Tim: Absolutely. I mean, part of my call to this church was that I knew and I heard that the church was not really in a thriving posture. We’d had some leadership changes. This church had had some leadership changes. But First Pres Colorado Springs, was the leader of a new branch of the Presbyterian Church, the Evangelical Covenant Order of Presbyterians, and all of us who were in that branch saw First Pres Colorado Springs as one of the flagship churches. For me, having it be the church in my hometown and having it be this flagship leadership church, it was really heavy on my heart that I knew from afar that things were not going so well. They had brought on a pastor that turned out to not be a great fit and that caused some quick leadership change and it left the church in a posture of kind of a lack of confidence and some confusion about next steps, and so when I stepped in, I knew those problems were there, but the experience was then of, oh gosh, there are deeper problems, there are deeper concerns. I’ve kind of compared it to when my wife and I moved to New Jersey and we bought a 1923 Craftsman kit home house that had been built on the GI bill. We sort of stepped in there and said, oh, darling, don’t worry, as soon as we buy the place, we’re going to pull the carpets out, we’re going to pull the curtains out, we’re going to pull all the wallpaper down, and that smell is going to go away and everything’s going to be great, and as we did that, we realized, oh my gosh, you know, under the carpets the floors have a problem, oh under the floors, the subfloor, oh, under the subfloor, the joists, and under the joists, the foundation. It was a little bit of an experience of that here at First Pres Colorado Springs. Robert, you’ll know this, but churches that have a long history and have had a huge impact on a city, there’s - there’s a sense, there’s a sentiment that they’ve got everything together, and there’s a motivation, internally and externally, to maintain that posture and that sort of – that sort of outward exposure, and so that, I think, reduplicated into what I felt like I fell into, which was the classic leadership donut of everyone around me is trying to tell me it’s okay, and everyone in the congregation wants it to be okay, and everyone in the city wants it to be okay, and we all want it to be okay, but there was something that was not – that was not okay, and that started to really present itself and we started to just go deeper and deeper as leadership to say, how deep do we need to dig before we really feel like what we’re building is being built on a solid foundation?

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Robert: So, at some point, you were looking around, assessing, saying to yourself, I think we need to do something here? Was this a difficult process, sort of, in a leadership position, you know, opening yourself up to – because at some point you decided to survey with Best Christian Workplaces and take a deeper look, was there anything that really tipped that over to make that decision, and what was that like? What were you feeling? What were you experiencing? Was it, you know, was it challenging and difficult emotionally to sort of take that step and be willing to hear whatever the feedback may be?

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Tim: Well, absolutely. When I say we were aware that something was off, every church will experience turnover and people coming through and trying on ministry and realizing their gifts are really meant for something else, or trying on a particular ministry like First Pres, and saying, this really isn’t where I’m going to be the best fit. But what we were experiencing in my first five years here, what I was experiencing was surprise departures, and sometimes as leaders we talk about, of course people are going to come and go, but the question you need to be asking is, are the right people staying or are the right people going? And what I was watching was too much of seeing the right people come into the church and want to serve the Lord well, and then I, in my chair, was surprised when there was a sudden departure and that the feedback we were getting on that departure was not – was actually that people were pretty dejected and demoralized by what they experienced, and so I needed to know more about what was it that you experienced and how could we maybe shift that or change that, and it became real for us that there was a large change that needed to happen, and so we entered into an entire staff and what we call our session, which is our governing board reorganization of the way that we were doing everything. One story about that, Robert, was I just – there was sort of a – there was a young lady who came to Christ through our college ministry from a college here in town that, I’m going to tell you, very few people meet the Lord on that college campus. It’s a tough place for the gospel. I was so excited that she had come to the Lord and then she came and she jumped into our youth ministry and was working with our kids, and there was a sudden departure that for me was a leadership moment that I said, you know what, I just don’t want to see this anymore, and I want to do everything that I can to make sure that this sort of thing doesn’t happen again. And so I went to my elders, and the gift of the Presbyterian Church is you have strong elders who have strong leadership, and I said, I need you all to help me with this, and they agreed to push all the chips in on staff health, and it was a year into that process that we were in a total reorganization of our church systems that my Transitional Executive Pastor and I looked at each other and said, we know there are problems but we don’t really have kind of a measurement tool. We don’t really have an instrument. And through a friendship with Michael Lindsay at Taylor University, I was aware of Best Christian Workplaces, and he was speaking so highly of – he said, Tim, if you need someone to come in and measure from the outside and give you an objective measurement of what’s going on in places that you can’t see, here’s an incredible tool and I recommend that you do it a year ago, and so, if you didn’t do it a year ago, the best time to do it is today, and so we brought Best Christian Workplaces in and took our first Best Christian Workplaces Survey in 2023, and it revealed exactly what we thought it might.

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Narrator: Leading well starts with listening well. At Best Christian Workplaces, our employee engagement survey helps you collect honest, anonymous feedback from your staff so you can lead with clarity. When you understand what drives team engagement, you retain top talent, increase productivity, reduce turnover, and uncover cost savings. We equip Christian leaders with research-driven insight to strengthen culture and lead with purpose. Because when your people flourish, your mission impact multiplies. Visit workplaces.org to learn more today.

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Robert: It sounds like to me you were in a position of – this is, this is time, we’re going to do something here. It was more of a determination versus apprehension to step forward with that, which is great, a good place to be. Then that - I love your analogy of the house when you were looking at pulling out the carpets and things like that. It sounds like you all went through that, made your overhaul, and it has paid dividends, so you know, to—

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Tim: And I would say to – yeah, Robert, to those Christian leaders, those pastors, or school leaders, or others who are thinking about that they’re in a tight situation like that, I just say, you know have the courage to keep walking toward that darker corner, keep pulling the carpet up in that corner, keep looking underneath there. I got to a point where I just didn’t want to see these things happening any longer, and I didn’t think I really could. I mean, I got to the point of just – I had to say to the elders, I can’t see this happen anymore and I don’t understand why it’s happening, so I need your help, and then Best Christian Workplaces stepped in and as I say, it was that diagnosis that we need because we knew that something was wrong. We knew that, hey, we don’t feel too good in the morning, we feel drowsy in the afternoon, we’re not – our legs feel heavy and doctors, there is something wrong and the Best Christian Workplaces Survey was able to say, yes, there are some things wrong. It’s like when your doctor tells you, oh yeah, the reason you feel that way is that your pituitary gland isn’t firing or something. There is something going off. You don’t have the right juices flowing. But the real blessing was that Best Christian Workplaces was able to say, but you know what, here are some things that you can do and we’re going to get started on them right away, and that was a huge help.

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Robert: That analogy is just so perfect, going to the doctor, because that’s exactly what an employee engagement survey looks like. It’s like going to the doctor for your blood labs and then you get real data and then you’re able to see comparable to other churches or whatever your sector may be, you know, how do we compare? What are our numbers here? Is this normal? Is this high? Is this low? And you now have a framework to move forward, because you can’t know where to go if you don’t know where you are right now. For those listening who are unfamiliar with – or don’t even know what the terms employee engagement even means, it’s really just assessing the health of your internal staff and culture. So I want to ask you, Pastor, did you – did the feedback you received maybe in your first survey, let’s just say, was there anything that you didn’t anticipate seeing in the data? Perhaps you didn’t want to see, as the leader, that came forth in those results?

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Tim: You know, I remember, Robert, asking one of my staff members in a trusted moment, and I said, on a scale of 1 to 5, I said, you’ve worked at a lot of different church staffs, and I just feel like we were still in this problem culture. I said, on a scale of 1 to 5, how healthy do you think our culture is? And he boldly, I think courageously said, Tim, I’d put it at a 3. I thought, what? I mean, you know, things are tough, but we’ve got good people onboard and we’ve got a great ministry here and things are going well, but he was right. When the Best Christian Workplaces Survey came in, of – well, Robert, we were in the 2^nd percentile on that first – on that first engagement survey, and so that, I think, there was some surprise in that. Like, I think we’re not doing too well, and actually when we asked our people and got into their shop and they were allowed to speak openly, through the survey anonymously and share their heart about what it was like to be trying to contribute to this mission from their seats – wow. Of all the churches surveyed, we were number 2 of all the churches surveyed, so we were both the second lowest and we were in the 2^nd percentile of engagement on that survey. And we opened that up and, as pastors and as elders, we just - we wept. I truly wept because I regretted that I was not able to move more quickly towards what I had suspected people were experiencing, but the surprise of that was, was the recognition - I guess the surprise of it was that there was sorrow in seeing it, but there was also the recognition of something that was verified that we could say, yes, here’s what’s happening and here are the problems that you’re having, and if we’re committed we can take steps to make this better from here, so we really - and I commend my elders and my staff and the congregation here because we all said, you know what, we want this to be a wonderful place for people to serve the Lord on the staff. We want to have a healthy staff culture, and we know that’s going to promote future ministry, and so the commitment was 100% and we just moved in immediately with as much as we could do of training and listening sessions and communication helps and all the steps that we could take over the next few years after that.

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Robert: Love hearing your heart there, and that really should be the heart posture of every pastor, really any Christian leader leading any organization, whether it’s a secular or you know, a nonprofit or what have you, is really to care for your flock, care about the people internally, and so I love hearing that and appreciate your heart posture, Pastor, there. And what I really appreciate about it is, for some, an employee engagement process is more of a checkbox. It’s like—

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Tim: Yeah.

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Robert: I think I’m supposed to do this, you know, let’s just try to get certified for marketing purposes. Of course, that’s not the heart or the intention behind any of it, you know. I want to ask you, could you share, to the extent that you’re willing to, of course, what kind of things did you start to change? Because that’s the difference. It’s one thing to take a survey. It’s another thing to care enough to make those bold changes and to begin to apply what you learned. What kind of insights can you share with us? What was making the changes? What was making things improve? What kind of things were you able to move the needle on and make some practical changes that might be helpful for our audience?

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Tim: And I would say that for us this journey was – it was an entire reorg of our systems and our decision making processes and our org chart, so we were engaged in a full reorganization of our church, and Best Christian Workplaces became a part of that because even with the systems changing - I mean you can change the playbook, but there are some things in the culture and the ways that we’re interacting with one another and seeing one another that were very deep seated and needed to be elevated out. One of those was how we approached conflict. I mean, one of the earliest things that we did was healthy conflict training and where we assessed one another’s conflict, sort of, personalities, and we could see as a staff, oh, this is somebody who you know just really avoids conflict or this is someone who loves to step into conflict, this is you know - and so - and how we react to that because in a church setting and I think in any ministry setting you’re always trying to minimize those things and you’re always trying to hope that they will go away on their own, and so you don’t spend a lot of time learning, well, how do we create constructive conflict? How do we – how do we pivot away from the meetings after the meetings or the parking lot meetings after the meetings after the meetings or the – or the secret chatroom that’s happening on the side of a meeting, the hallway conversations and the no-fly zones of our, you know, areas that people don’t want to go because an uncomfortable conversation has happened – how do you pull all that out of the system and create space for healthy and constructive conflict that’s actually going to bring the best ideas forward for the ministry? And that was a very early thing was to try to get to a one-team, one-dream, sort of, way of healthy communication in handling conflict. But that bit of communication was also huge. We realized that people were siloed in different departments because they could do their work in there and fulfill what they felt like God was calling them to do, but once they tried to work with another department, well now their head was popped up out of the silo, and there were really bad things that happened as people tried to work together with other departments and people had history and memory of just – ooh, when I try to work with this other department or bring them in, there are some painful things that happen, so I’m just going to keep my head down and keep working in my section. And so, we had to build a one team, one dream, kind of sustainable strategy approach and get everybody up above their silos where they could work together freely. One of the things I brought, that really our staff has really said, hey, this is unique and has really changed things for us, I said, what if everybody in the house could get together for 15 minutes before lunch on Monday for what we call a bullpen? My friends who work at Focus on the Family in town, they told me about this practice that Jim Dailey would have saying, everybody’s around, if you’re in the house, just pause, get into the central courtyard of Focus on the Family. We call it the bullpen and you’re just going to get 15 minutes from key leadership of this is what’s going on this week. I said, could we have a bullpen? And you know in early iterations of my leadership here, that would have been absolutely impossible to try to pull people together. No one would come. But people just started coming out, and they started making it part of their weekly rhythm, and before you know it, they’re writing down on their engagement survey, you know what’s made a huge difference is just this time of this bullpen where Pastor Tim gets up and says, here’s what’s going on this week. If you’ve got a nametag, I want you to know about it. Every nametag knows what’s going on and it could be things like, hey, the stairs are getting new carpet or the window cleaners are here or there is a gigantic, very important memorial service happening and there’s going to be a 21-gun salute on the front steps of the church, so be ready. Whatever, you know, is going on that week, we just had a minute to look at each other in the eye and say, here are the big things that are happening this week and also do some celebrating of, wow, this weekend was awesome. Yesterday was awesome. So and so stepped forward and we saw how you leaned in to help and to solve that problem, and so it just becomes this 15 minute kind of influential connection point that has brought everybody’s heart together in a new way, and that little thing, that’s just a little deal, but it has really turned the dial a great deal as far as staff unity.

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Robert: I like that. A couple things, you know, conflict resolution, there are so many resources and great training and things that you can do to mitigate the problems that can come from staff that doesn’t know how to manage that, and then like what you said, a little thing, and sometimes it is a deeper thing. Oftentimes it is a small thing. It’s not a huge lift to have an additional meeting, you know celebrate some things, meet together for 15 minutes, and what a difference it can make to have just a fresh new cadence, a different way of doing things, so I hope that’s encouraging to leaders out there. This is not – really none of this is rocket science. This is practical steps that you can take to make dramatic improvements. We’re really encouraged by that. And I’d love for you to share. You’ve been working with us for a few years. You’ve been on this culture journey for a few years. Talk to me about, you know, how would you describe how First Pres feels today versus how it felt maybe a few years ago? What feels different? How are things going?

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Tim: Robert, it is a different world. It’s a different – it’s a different landscape. Listen, I can tell you, I’ll be open, there were times that I was driving down to work for those five – six – years where it was everything in my heart, it took everything I had just to drive down to work and I would pray the Lord’s Prayer over and over again, say Lord, I know this is going to be a hard day. There are these fires burning. There is conflict happening. There is disappointment, frustration. Lord, can you get me through this day? Can you get me through this day? And we took that first engagement survey and verified all of that, that yes, something’s off, and boy, it’s way off, but let’s start working together. The second year we took the engagement survey, doing all the work we could in our transition and our reorganization, and the indicators only popped up two little hundredths of a point, so we only went up just a tiny little bit, but our Best Christian Workplaces consultant said, look, we know you don’t see the top line moving, but all the right pieces are moving, all the right parts of the organization are getting healthier, and keep going because I believe that you’re going to see a big shift. And the third time we took the survey we did enter into a healthy and flourishing segment of the Best Christian Workplaces Engagement Survey. And the thing is that when that happened, we kind of already knew it because you could already feel it. It was a different place. It was different. How it feels to drive down to work, to get out of your car and pull on the front door and walk into the space, it was a totally different place. Somewhere along this journey I learned that the same part of our brain that we use to process unresolved conflict is the part of the brain that you need to produce creativity and because you’re stuck in a place where you can’t solve this issue that’s troubling your heart, you’re just spinning energy, literal energy, in your brain to try to solve something that’s unsolvable. But when you come to peace with that, now creativity is released, and what I experienced was that my whole staff was stuck in unresolved conflict. We had in our first engagement survey over 29% disengaged, disengaged, meaning not only are they not sure, but they’re actually pulling against, and when they’re brushing up against people that are engaged or people that are sort of in the middle, they’re pulling them back from engagement. What shifted is that the staff here at First Pres is now this beehive, this buzzing beehive of creativity because in our last engagement survey, just last month, we recognized that we were 2% in the disengaged category, and so going from 1 out of 3 people that you bump into with a nametag on being disengaged, now we’re down to 2% disengaged, and the difference is just – it’s incredible the difference that it is to walk in and be a team together.

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Robert: Wow. Congratulations. Yes. Our Founder, Al Lopus, I’ve heard him say a couple times that you can walk into a workplace, and even just as a visitor, and you can feel if the culture’s not right, or you can feel if the culture is right, that buzz, that energy, that inspiration, that innovation, that creativity, people enjoying working together. You know, I want to just give you an opportunity maybe to encourage others who are listening, other leaders. You might be a pastor of a church. You might be leading a different kind of an organization. The concepts, the organizational psychology, is the same across the board. I’d love for you to just speak in to whoever’s listening. They want that different vibe at their workplace. They want to be able to lead their organization to a place that maybe doesn’t feel right to this place that you’re describing today for your church, which is energy and creativity. They want that. They don’t know what to do. Where would you say to begin?

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Tim: It takes a certain humility, Robert, to sit in a chair of leadership and say, I think something’s not right. And I think even maybe I’m doing things that need to change, that need to shift. Maybe there are things in my own practice that are not right, and to say before the Lord, Lord, I want the people that you draw towards yourself to go into service of ministry and Christian mission and Christian action, a school, in a university, a ministry, a church, I want those people to be cared for, first and foremost. I want to know, Lord, that the people that you’re drawing close to this mission, that You’ve touched their heart and pulled them into the vision of what this church or this ministry is doing, I want to know, Lord, that they are cared for, that they are growing, that they are nurtured, and that if it’s – if it’s not the right fit that when they move on they look back and say, that was the best place I’ve ever worked, that was the place that I grew the most in the Lord. No, it wasn’t a right fit for me forever, but I spent a few years there and I got closer to Jesus and I knew more about myself and how to love and serve the Lord. And if you’re in a leadership place where that just feels impossible, I’ll tell you another story. When things were really rough and I was wondering if there could be a change or not, listen, this is a big place and it has got a lot of history, and there are a lot of power players and there are a lot of power dynamics. To think about shifting, turning a ship like this, it’s pretty harrowing to think, I don’t know if it can turn or not, to be honest. There was a moment that I shared with the staff. I was sitting on my bed, getting ready for the day, and the silly Amazon Prime commercial popped up. I don’t know if we can advertise Amazon Prime on the podcast, but it was an Amazon Prime commercial where Cleopatra was leading her team across the deserts of Egypt and she ordered her team a bunch of gifts because they were distressed about going across the desert, and at the end of this commercial, after she had ordered these gifts from Amazon Prime for everybody, it said, just at the very end of this commercial, from then on it was more of a one team, one dream, kind of a thing. This silly commercial, and I started crying. I started crying. I said, Lord, could my church, could this team, could we ever, could we ever be a one team, one dream kind of a staff? Could that ever happen here? What I want to encourage a leader who’s in that place saying, could this ever happen here? It can happen. It takes humility and patience and perseverance. Bring in some help. Listen humbly to others. Lay it out before the Lord. Lay it out before your leadership. Name the problem. Resolve to move towards it. In three years’ time, we moved from 60% of our organization was either disengaged or in the middle category of sort of not sure. We’ve moved to where we are at 84% engaged in this mission and excited about this mission. The change in that, the whole church is going to feel it, and because the whole church is going to feel it, the Lord’s going to be able to release ministry in this church in ways that have been blocked and have been frustrated for years, and the whole city’s going to feel that, and the mission of Christ is going to go forward in a more powerful way because the elders of this team and the staff of this team said, look, we need help, and so please help us and humbly walk forward in that process of receiving and engaging in the help that came. I cannot help – I cannot thank you and Al Lopus and Giselle Jenkins and the whole Best Christian Workplaces team enough for being that help and being prepared to be that help that the Lord could bring to a church like ours.

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Robert: I can’t add to that. Thank you so much. It’s been an honor having you on the podcast, Pastor Tim, and working with Best Christian Workplaces over the last few years. Thank you so much for joining us today.

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Tim: Robert, thanks for having us, and God bless you in your work. Keep at it. What you’re doing is really important. And for listeners who are, who are tuning in, just I hope that this testimony is one that says, it could happen, it could change, there could be another day, there could be a moment where you come, you come dancing out of your car and pull a front door of your church or your school or your organization, and say, I cannot wait to see what God is doing here today, and it is worth it. It’s worth it to go through whatever you need to, to walk through, to get to that countryside.

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Robert: Amen. Listeners, thank you for joining the podcast today. If this has benefitted you in any way, please share it with a friend, share it with a colleague. Let somebody know there is a solution, there is a path, they can be encouraged. Also subscribe to the podcast, Called to Flourish. You don’t want to miss what’s coming next on the next episode. Until then, thank you so much, Pastor Tim, for being on the podcast. Thank you all for listening. We will see you next time.