Transcript: Building a Flourishing Church Culture Through Trust and Transparency // Ashley Wooldridge, Jeff Osborne, Christ’s Church of the Valley

Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast

“Building a Flourishing Church Culture Through Trust and Transparency“

November 25, 2024

Ashley Wooldridge and Jeff Osborne

Intro: Are you a Christian leader eager to transform your leadership and culture? Well, in this episode of the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast, Ashley Wooldridge and Jeff Osborne, from Christ’s Church of the Valley, share how they've built a culture of operational excellence, deep trust, and transformational leadership. You'll discover practical strategies to engage your staff; recruit and develop volunteers; and create a sustainable, Christ-centered organization that thrives. And if you're ready to lead with purpose and see your ministry flourish, this episode is for you.

Welcome: Welcome to the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast, your home for open, honest, and insightful conversations to help develop your leadership, your team, and build a flourishing workplace culture.

Al Lopus: I'm Al Lopus, the co-founder of the Best Christian Workplaces and author of Road to Flourishing. My passion is to equip Christian leaders like you cultivate engaged, flourishing workplaces.

I'm delighted to welcome Ashley Wooldridge and Jeff Osborne to the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast today. Ashley is the pastor, senior pastor, of Christ’s Church of the Valley, and Jeff is the executive pastor. They serve a large multi-site church in Phoenix, Arizona.

In my conversation with Ashley and Jeff, you'll benefit from their wisdom in many ways. You'll learn practical strategies for fostering operational excellence and building a culture of trust and transparency within your team. They'll share insights on how to engage both staff and volunteers, ensuring that your entire organization is aligned with its mission. You'll also hear about the importance of leadership development, equipping the next generation of leaders, and sustaining a healthy work-life balance by practicing rest and Sabbath. Whether you lead a small team or a large organization, this episode offers actionable steps to strengthen your leadership and culture.

I think you're going to love this interview with Ashley and Jeff. But before we dive in, this podcast is proudly sponsored by the Best Christian Workplaces’ Employee Engagement Survey. So don’t wait. This is a perfect time to gather vital insights from your employees to assess the health of your workplace culture. As Pastor Ashley says in today's episode, “An Employee Engagement Survey is like a checkup for your organization. Just like a regular doctor's visit can catch something serious early, the Survey helps you to spot issues in your culture before they become destructive. It's a tool for ensuring your team stays healthy and engaged.” Are you ready to transform your culture? Visit workplaces.org to learn more and start your journey to becoming a flourishing workplace today.

And hello to our new listeners. Thanks for joining us as we honor your investment of time by creating valuable lessons like this.

Let me tell you a little bit more about Ashley and Jeff. Ashley’s the senior pastor of Christ’s Church of the Valley, pursuing a mission to win the Valley for Christ. Ashley’s an empowering leader who provides inspirational teaching and visionary leadership. He has a passion for healthy-church and organizational culture and works with a gifted executive team to shape the future direction of CCV. He holds a BA from the Pacific Christian College and an MBA and has studied theology at Fuller Theological Seminary. And he and his wife, Jamie, have three girls and love to see marriages and families thrive.

Jeff serves as the executive pastor at Christ’s Church in the Valley, and there he stewards adult ministries, Leadership Institute, staff leadership development, talent and culture development, stewardship, generosity, and strategic planning. He holds a BSE in electrical engineering, and has held CEO and senior executive roles in public and private companies. He and his wife, Pam, have been married for 31 years and have three children. Jeff is passionate about leadership, culture, generosity, marriages, and the intersection of business leadership and faith.

Here’s my conversation with Ashley and Jeff.

Ashley and Jeff, it’s great to have you back on the podcast. I’m looking forward to our conversation today.

Ashley Wooldridge: Yeah. Great to be with you, Al.

Jeff Osborne: Indeed. Thank you for having us back.

Al: Yeah.

So, as I have conversations with leaders, I'm always fascinated with how they take the concept of operational excellence and implement it in practical ways. And you guys have done this. You lead a large staff with multiple sites, lots of programs, you know, complex complements to the ministry. And in your Employee Engagement Survey, your team feels strongly that Christ’s Church of the Valley is well managed. That means that things work well. And I'm sure there are practices and processes that you and your senior team have to facilitate excellence. And excellence over time has to do with involving all levels of your teams, from the front line to behind the scenes. And what practices do you have in place to equip people to achieve operational excellence, and how do you maintain this over time, even as there are changes in the environment and even in people?

So, Jeff, executive pastor, let’s start with you.

Jeff: Well, the first thing I would say is, you know, when you hear the term operational excellence, for some that speaks of metrics and process and structure. And, for sure, there's some of that, and we need to have that. But I think if you really simplified it for us, it's have we casted a clear vision for that staff so that they know what success looks like? Have we made sure that the athletes on the team are in the best shape they can be in to do the mission at hand? And are we making sure that we're equipping them, giving them the tools that they need to be successful? And I know that might sound simple, but in the end of the day, if we know where we're going—we have clarity of that, we’ve picked a few paths or strategies to get there, we’ve equipped our team with the right training and the right investment for them to be successful—now, yes, we’ll put scorecards in place, and we’ll have some of those things to make sure that we know we're on track, but honestly, it's coming back to those things of culture that make sure that we have invested well in our people.

And so we've got a handful of those things that we can hit on, Al. But I want to just say that I think—and I think as we go through this podcast, we'll unpack those—but honestly, I want people to remember, it doesn't matter how good your systems and processes are if you don't have a clear vision, the right team on the field, and invested in them with the right development and training and put a culture in place.

Al: Clear vision, the right team, and invested in people to accomplish what you're after. And we'll get into some specifics. Yeah. Look forward to that, Jeff.

And Ashley, what would you like to add to this?

Ashley: I’m agreeing with everything Jeff said. I think excellence doesn't happen by accident. I think there's so much that goes into making sure you lead with excellence. And as we get into this podcast, there's some real specific things that we've tried to say, “Hey, let's create clarity,” because we think clarity is kindness with our employees and our organization in terms of where we're headed, which allows you to be more excellent if you know where you're headed. And then let's also create the systems that we feel like can lead to excellence. I use a James Clear quote a lot because I love it. He says, “You don’t rise to the level of your goals; you fall to the level of your systems.” And so oftentimes, as churches, we have these goals and aspirations to be excellent, but yet we don't have the systems behind the scenes that actually would back up what we actually want. So these are all important things that sometimes we don't talk about enough in churches and we need to.

Al: Yeah. So it's one thing to have goals, but then, where are the systems beneath it to really help you accomplish those goals? It’s so often missing. Yeah.

So you guys have been ministry partners of the Best Christian Workplaces now for several years, doing the Employee Engagement Survey on a regular basis. And you've got highly engaged employees. In fact, recently you've actually achieved a new high in our ratings, and with over 80% of your employees are fully engaged in the workplace. And sometimes when things are going well, you're tempted to coast for a while. “Oh, we don't need to do that. We've accomplished what we want to accomplish. We've reached a high level. Let's just coast and take a year or two off and focus on something else.” What do you see as the regular value, as the value of regular assessments of your workplace culture and health?

Ashley: Well, first, we want to just thank you, Al, and the whole team, because we have taken this Survey on a regular basis now for years. And we're not going to let up, because the gravitational pull in church, or any organization for that matter, is towards complacency. And it's easy when—we just had our highest score ever on our Best Christian Workplaces’ Survey. That's awesome. The worst thing we could do is walk away and be like, “We're good,” you know, wring our hands and say, “We’re probably good. We could take this five years down the road.” That's not how health works. Health works when you're regularly assessing what's going on.

I'll give you a story. My wife last year—my wife is, if you saw a picture of her, she is unbelievably healthy. She looks healthy. She feels healthy. Everything about her is healthy. And yet she went for a routine checkup of the doctor, and we found out she had cancer. You couldn't see that. And especially, I think as, and I’ll just use it organizationally, as an organization grows and you have more and more employees, you at the top can look at everything and think, “We're good. Everything's great. Couldn't be better.” That’s what we tell people, right? And then, you do a Survey and you might find that, yeah, most of the body's working really, really good. But, man, you got a spot here of cancer that if you don't address it quickly, it could actually be destructive. So in my wife's case, she goes to a regular checkup, we caught it early, and, like, just praise God, we feel like she's going to be okay now. But it's only because we caught that early.

That's what an Employee Engagement Survey does for you over time, is it tells you, this is where things are going really well, but here's places that we really need to pay attention, because if we don't, we may not feel it right now, but in a year or two, we may have a destructive force on our hands. And so that's why we're just committed every single year to assessing the organization from how we're doing from a cultural standpoint, and the things we say matter.

Al: Well, thanks. And I'm glad to hear your wife is better and cancer free and getting regular checkups.

So when you receive the results of the Survey, how do you engage your teams in creating action plans and looking for areas of continuous improvement? What would you say to a leader who isn't convinced of the need of regular assessing employee engagement?

Jeff: Well, I would say, Al, from our perspective, it is something that we have an obligation, once we've received the assessment, to do something with it. There is nothing worse than asking for people's opinion, saying we want to listen generously, and then, when we get the feedback, we go, “That's interesting,” and we park it.

And so what's so important for us—in fact, we're doing this later today, actually—is Tara is going to sit down with our executive team and our senior leaders and go over the results in a way where she can help unpack what we can't see from a score or some verbatim comments, because she's seen so many churches. And so what's so helpful is we start with the top of the organization, we really listen well to what Tara has to say, to find out, again, as a guide—who would hire a guide, an expert, and then ignore the path they're trying to take you on? And so for us, it'd be crazy to hire a personal trainer and then not do the routine that they've given us to go work out those muscles—so we start there, and then we take and we get all of the team scores, and we break that down. And every single manager in our organization goes through their assessment for their team, and then they take that down and share it with the people in their organization, because the reason we have a 93-plus percent response rate is because we actually do something with the Survey. And I think we've built some credibility to say, “If we ask you, we're actually going to do some—we have a responsibility to do something with that.” And so for us, it's so important that we get all the way through the organization.

Then in January, when Ash does our all staff, we will share the results with our entire organization together, and we will share the three or four takeaways that we are going to do in that year. So whatever patterns we see, whatever there is to work on, we're going to take those and put those in place. And that's our accountability, Al, to the organization who took the time to give us the feedback, and now we have to do something with what they've given us.

Al: And you guys are so transparent with the data. I've had more than one organization, when they report out the data to the all staff, well, they'll mention the top-ten scores, but they all happen to, like, gloss over the bottom-ten scores, you know.

Ashley: Yeah. I want to speak to that for a second, Al, because just as the—I mean, being transparent, like, being the senior pastor here, or if a top-level leader is listening to this, there’s a temptation to do that, right?, to say, “Let's talk about all the great things in our score, because if I talk to you about all the great things, you'll feel good about our culture, and we’ll all beat our chests, and everyone's going to be happy,” versus not sharing the hard things or things we need to improve. Here's the reality and why you have to share the hard things: all your employees already know. I mean, to think that just because I don't share it, nobody knows, that is really like looking at yourself in the mirror and walking away and pretending like you didn't see what you saw. Right? Everybody already knows in the organization where we have some places to improve. Majority of employees know that. You acknowledging it is a sign of good leadership, and then not only acknowledging it, but as Jeff has said—and this is where he and his team have done such a good job of helping drive this in our organization—of saying, “Not only are we going to acknowledge it, but we are also going to tell you here's exactly what we intend to do over the next year to address some of these things. And then we're going to go work that plan.” And now you're developing credibility with your team, of saying, “Okay, they're honest. They're transparent. But they're not just honest and transparent; they're action oriented and going to do something about it.” This is how we drive trust, and trust is the oxygen in our organization.

Jeff: Boy, that's so true. As Ash said, we all have blind spots personally as leaders, right? And a blind spot is usually a strength taken too far. Well, the thing that helps us with blind spots are mirrors. If you're driving a U-Haul van and it's got tons of blind spots, what do you do? You look in the mirror, and that helps alleviate those blind spots. Well, it's the same with this Survey. I think organizationally we have blind spots that are often coming from our strengths as an organization. And so it's so apparent for us to be able to understand organizational blind spots that we can figure out how to maybe tone down those strengths or how to make sure that we're not allowing that to become a liability. And so we have an obligation organizationally to be aware of those blind spots and, as Ash said, care about our team so much that we won't leave them there. If we see that in an assessment and go, “Yeah, but look at all this great stuff,” it's just a disservice. We’re not serving them well. We need to serve these guys well by making sure that we're not going—we love them too much to leave them there, so let's go work it.

And we tend to probably overfocus on the blind spots of the negativity because we're just wanting to make sure we are so honest and transparent with our team that we probably even go a little too far on that. But I think I'd rather lean, if I had to lean in one direction, I’d rather we lean towards crazy vulnerability to create that trust with the organization, for sure.

Ashley: Yep, true.

Al: Yeah. Trust is the currency of relationships, and we're all on the relationship business, that's for sure.

And, yeah, Ash, you're absolutely right. I've been sitting in meetings, as leaders will describe their Survey results, and, you know, and they think, “Well, if I hide some of these shortcomings, you know, nobody will know.” Well, no. The employees all know because they're the ones that gave the feedback in the first place.

Ashley: That’s right. That’s exactly right. Yeah.

Al: Yeah. And they're just waiting for the leader to be credible enough to explain exactly what reality is. Max De Pree says the first job of a leader is to communicate reality.

Ashley: Yeah. To find reality.

Al: Yeah. Exactly.

One unique feature of your church is the strong commitment to leadership development. And you have a Leadership Institute, which is a residency program to equip leaders for ministry. So talk a little bit about the importance of equipping the next generation of leaders for ministry and how you came to this model of leadership development. Why did you start this program, and what have you learned along the way as you continue to grow in this area? Jeff, I know that developing leaders is a passion of yours.

Jeff: Yeah. I would say we feel such an obligation to pour into the next generation and invest in them. We all know the statistics of what happens with new pastors that get in and burn out and end up leaving the ministry within five, seven years. And we also know that Bible colleges are struggling a bit. And so we feel like it is not a “nice to have” but a “must to have” for us to pour into the next generation of pastors through our Leadership Institute Residency Program. And that program was designed, we're now in our thirteenth cohort, so we've been doing it for 13 classes now, just under 400 residents have gone through our program. And in our organization, 82 of our current 560 staff members are former residents. And part of that is just us believing so much in the Bible knowledge that they have and they've learned, how do we couple that with practicum, real-life leadership experience so they can see and know the expectations of ministry, so when they get there, they're not disappointed because that gap between expectation and reality is disappointment? And we don't want these young pastors to go out and think, “This is going to be a cakewalk. This is going to be nothing but easy.” We want them to understand the reality of that heaviness that comes with having to deal with people, but yet the joy that comes with keeping your cup filled and doing it well.

So if we can teach young pastors how to pace themselves, to have a ministry that's going to last 20, 30, 40 years, that is something that we know is going to pay back to the “big C” Church. It helps our staff, but more importantly, we send them out to all the churches across the country. And we do the same thing internally with our staff development, leadership, and pastoral skills. We can't just assume that those are something that they should know because they graduated Bible college, and we just pour into them and give them the basics so that they have what it takes to be successful. And to us, it's an investment that has such an ROI for the lives that those people will touch if they can stay in ministry and stay equipped to be healthy in their ministry, they're going to impact lives for years and years to come. So we are super passionate about it. And Ash, himself, having really invested in the program when it first started 11 years ago, might want to talk a little bit about that.

Ashley: I just couldn't echo enough how important the program is not only for our church, for the “big C” Church, but I would even bring it back even to our staff Engagement Survey. One of the things I think that showed up a little more as a warning sign for us is years ago we are getting some feedback. Am I getting enough training in the role I'm in? Am I getting developed? And we are getting some feedback that we have this Leadership Institute where we're training residents, but we actually ramped up the development of our own staff as well because that is so critical for your staff being able to continue on for a long time in ministry and for them to feel invested in.

I've heard a stat for a long time that I've heard different pastors quote, and it says every time your church doubles in size, about 50% of your staff is not going to be able to come along with you. And while I've heard that and been like, “Well, yeah, maybe that's true,” I think, “Why does that have to be true?” That doesn't have to be true. If you're investing and developing and providing environments, accountability, and the right training to help develop your staff, I think your staff, a majority of your staff can and should be able to come along with you if you continue to challenge, develop, and create environments where they really, truly can grow.

So, this is a critical area for our church. I think it should be a critical area of need for every church.

Al: Yeah. Staff development. Yeah. People want to grow, I find. They're part of an exciting church like yours. They're seeing growth all around them. That's just in the air. It's in the environment. I think a lot of people want to grow and don't want to just stay stagnant. And I think the Spirit also helps us in that same way.

So, let's talk about communicating with your staff and also your congregation. In the Employee Engagement Survey, we ask about employee perceptions of whether the organization has improved for the better in the past year. And you and your senior team do a great job of communicating positive momentum, you know, and already starting to understand how that starts at the beginning of the year with an all-staff meeting, as you mentioned. Well, share with us some insights about how you communicate so effectively. And I believe sharing a positive momentum with your staff and your congregation, so they feel a sense of energy and the improvements that you're making over time. And I found that, again, the sense of momentum, we asked the question over the past year, things have improved, and that highly correlates with an overall culture. So what are some of the ways that you do this?

Ashley: I'll let Jeff weigh in here, too. I might just mention a few things. The communication side of our Employee Engagement score has always showed up as a room for us. We've got some room to grow and improve. This year, I think we're seeing some momentum, a movement, and we have just put a ton of intentionality around this, not only trying to communicate in all-staff meetings and really having conversations ahead of time of saying, “What does our staff need to hear that they may not hear?” And if I just personalize it, there's a lot of times that I am missing communicating something that Jeff or someone else on our executive team or leadership team will say, “Hey, we actually need to talk to the staff about that.” And I'm like, “Oh, wow.” Sometimes I can get—and I don't know if any other pastor can relate with this—I can get so focused on communicating with the congregation, which is also really important, sometimes we have to look at ourselves in the mirror and say we actually communicate really well with the staff before we communicate with the congregation. There's years at CCV when I’d hear from staff, and they'd say, “Man, first time I heard about that was when you said it from the stage.” I'm like, “Well, that's not good,” right? How valuable does that make you feel? And that really takes away some of the vision and buy in that you want with your staff, especially as you grow, when the congregation asks about something you may be doing or what's going on.

So, I think we have a lot more tools and systems we put in place to try to communicate with our staff, whether it's our internal communication platform that we have, whether it's all staff meetings. But I would say in general—and Jeff has done a good job helping drive this, of really thinking from a staff perspective, where and when do we need to communicate? What are we not communicating? And we've seen a real improvement on this, and I love seeing our scores go up on it.

Jeff: Yeah. It’s been good because this one, we have been hit on this one as one of our lower scores for probably three or four years.

Ashley: Yep.

Jeff: But what's so interesting about it is we can do the mechanics of communication, but part of what Ash has reminded our staff is you've got to communicate seven times before the message really hits home. And so we love to transmit, and we think that they've received. Well, transmitting is not communicating. They have to receive it. They have to catch it. It has to be in a language that they're going to understand it.

One of the things that Ash does really well from the stage as well as with our staff is vulnerability, exercising humility of vulnerability. I tell people all the time that don't know Ash personally, I said, “Hey, the same guy you see on stage is the same guy we’re with in the conference rooms.” And so the importance of that is to understand that communication is all about vulnerability and transparency. It doesn't mean you share everything. It means you know when to share it. But if you can't share what's coming around the corner with somebody, no one loves to be surprised. And like Ash said, sometimes we might get ahead of ourselves. We're moving fast, and we might announce, I don't know, a new campus or something new that Ash is doing, and we might have told the congregation first. We've been really careful about that, and said, “Hey, we're sending them a message that they're getting leftovers.” And so now we're super careful to make sure we tell our staff first, and we give them that ability to hear it direct from the leadership team.

We've spent a lot of time, Al, on our cultural fundamentals, as we've talked before. And one of those is speaking straight. And the second one that couples that is listening generously. Those two things are such a core part of communicating. Listening generously means we're going to take this Survey serious. Listening generously means we're going to listen to feedback even when we don't like it, when they're telling us that we don't have something right. And then speaking straight is saying what needs to be said, because as Ash said, clarity is kindness. It's unkind to be unclear. And so we owe it to our staff to speak straight with them, to make sure we're being vulnerable and transparent, making sure that we're spending the time doing one on ones. We can do all the big group meetings, but if we're not spending time individually with each of those people, then how are we going to know how they're doing?

We meet with Ash every week—and very, just a handful of weeks, as he’s traveling, where we're not able to do that on Wednesdays—we get our time with Ash every single week, and it's just important that we can stay connected that way. And so communication is a muscle group. It’s not a one and done. It's something that you have to continually exercise. And so we've had to teach our staff, you are shepherding your flock. If you don't know the condition of your flock, how can you shepherd well? Well, Proverbs tells us, we've got to know the condition of our flock. And so it's super important that we—and communication takes time. It takes a lot of time. And it'd be a lot easier to just move along and not worry about it and let people catch up. But it is so important for us.

We use a simple thing, Al, called the Triple A in our one on ones: ask, assess, and advise. Ask how they're doing. Check in on them. Make sure, “Hey, how's your mother-in-law? Hey, how's that going with your son or your daughter?” Assess: how are they doing with a project? and hey, what's getting in the way? How are you progressing with what you're working on? And then advise: give them some advice. Help them prioritize if we thrown too much at them. Allow them the opportunity to be successful.

And communication is something—we actually have a leadership class on it, Al, because we’ve realized we shouldn't take for granted communicating. So we teach our staff how to do vulnerable, transparent communication well to help create trust. And so it's a pretty big deal for us. We're not perfect at it, but we're getting more right than we are wrong.

Al: Oh, you're doing great. Yeah. Well, we still have 20% more to get fully engaged.

Jeff: There you go. There you go.

Al: But 80% fully engaged is fantastic. And I like the three A's. Yeah, absolutely, Jeff. Ask, assess, and advise. And, you know, that's two-way communication. You’re asking. You’re listening. You’re, as you say, listening generously, every week and one on one. And then, assessing and discussing. And then, advising. So that’s just great.

You know, every church, large and small, mobilizes volunteers, you know, and this is a big topic, volunteer engagement. And so you mobilize volunteers as well as your paid staff to cover the ministry touchpoints, both within the church and in service opportunities locally and even globally. So let's talk about engaging volunteers and best practices and recruiting, training, and even retaining volunteers. How do your principles and practices impact volunteers at Christ’s Church of the Valley? What have you learned over the years about engaging these volunteers, and are there some similarities with staff engagement? What differences are there? So, yeah, give us some background here.

Ashley: I might start at this level because I think it's really important. I think you have to value this as one of the highest values in the whole entire organization, that you really care about developing and equipping volunteers. You know, in a church, it's so easy to think, “Oh, the pastors do ministry,” or “We need to hire more staff.” And you may. But when we hire our staff and pastoral staff and other staff, we say the job of a pastor is not to do the ministry, but to equip the saints to do ministry. We are designed as a basic value to equip our church to step up and use their giftings inside the church to actually be able to do ministry. So that becomes a value that we try to have every single staff member understand right up front in the hiring process. And then, much of our, even, employee on ramp, which we have very specific systems for, is training on volunteer recruitment. How do we equip our volunteers? How do we provide clarity to our volunteers? No different than we would with a brand-new staff member. It's the same process when we want to try to on ramp volunteers.

So this becomes a big value for us where culturally I tell people all the time the strength of CCV is not what happens on the stage on the weekend. The strength of CCV is our staff and volunteers. And what is the value and process in which we're investing in and equipping not only our staff, but we have to have the same amount of intentionality of equipping our volunteers?

Jeff: I think, as Ash said, we have over 12,000 volunteers that helps us manage our 17 campuses. And, Al, I would tell you, as much as that might sound like a big number, can I tell you? we don't have enough?

Ashley: Yeah.

Jeff: We don't. And it's for two reasons. As Ash said, we can't do the work ourselves. But secondly, we owe it to these people that come to our church—the men, women, and children—to allow them the opportunity to take their next step. So it's not just for us because we need the help. They need to feel needed. They need the opportunity to stretch and grow because we're going to challenge our volunteers. We do. We both recruit them, but then we develop them. And so we measure our teams on two aspects of volunteer work: recruiting enough of them; but once they're in the fold, how do you develop them? How do we raise them to not just be a kid's volunteer, but a lead volunteer that can lead other volunteers? Because what it does for us is it actually helps us test drive, would they be one day a staff member? Or they just want to grow their leadership. They might be a young high-school student that's volunteering in J High or kids, and we want to teach them how to be young leaders. And so we have a goal this next year to raise our serving numbers by 20%. And so we'd like to end 2025 with 15,000 volunteers. And again, the number itself’s not important, but what's important is that, as Ash said, it's a constant focus for us to be able to say, “How do you replicate yourself? What's your force multiplier?” It's your volunteers. I'm not sure, but sometimes we think we're so good that we are going to go run that ministry. No, the ministry will be run by those volunteers that we equip, as Ash said. And I think part of it for us is to make sure, like, when we hear someone in a selection panel in our recruiting process, that says, “I’d love to be a kid's pastor because I just love holding babies,” or “I love doing it,” that's awesome, but that's not what you're going to do. You're going to be recruiting volunteers and developing them to hold babies. And so you're going to have a whole bunch of women that desperately want to hold babies, and you're going to help them figure out how to do that.

And so volunteers, for us is, as Ash said, it is our culture. It is everything for us. And we've got to keep pushing ourselves to release. We do a pretty good job of equipping them. One of the things we've got to keep challenging ourselves on is how do we release? Because we like to hold on to some of that fun work, and we're like, “Well, you guys are going to do that stuff that's kind of the mundane and boring. But this part here, I'm going to hold on to.” And where we've challenged our staff in the last year and a half is this concept of what we call serve plus. How do you get not just the normal volunteers that do kids work or food service or greeters, but professionals? People that are very smart and have all kinds of scar tissue that have great professional experience, how do we open up and release to allow them to do work in some of our central ministry areas that normally we would hold on to? And so this is an exercise of release, Al, to be able to say, “We have got to release some of the good stuff to allow others that maybe have a skill set that's beyond just picking up trash or flipping burgers. And we need their minds, not just their hands.” And so how do we get that and their leadership to be used?

There's so many people out at church wanting to engage, but they don't want to pass out bulletins, Al. They want to think about IT strategies, and they want to think about some of these other things. And we need their help, too. And so we're challenging ourselves in that area to get better at serve plus.

Al: Yeah. I was recently listening to somebody talk about the 80/20 rule and how we need to be delegating 80% of what we do most of the time and keeping just the 20% that only we can do.

Jeff, it’s causing me—okay. Recruit and develop. And I’ve been involved with a lot of churches. There's a lot of recruiting going on because they see the need for volunteers. But then, there isn't much on the development side. And, boy, I think you're right. It’s the development side where people grow. And of course, that's also part of our personal discipleship process, where we're serving and growing. How do you do some of this with volunteers on the development side?

Ashley: Well, I think you said the word that I want to make sure comes out too, that this is discipleship, so we have to look at it. And it's great to recruit a volunteer and get them plugged in. But how do you develop them? Is there a process to do that? I'd say one very simple thing we do is we allocate budget to all our different ministry areas to actually develop their volunteers.

And I would just, I want to add one thing in here, Al, because I think it's important for maybe someone who's listening to hear this: I think one of the most underutilized age groups of volunteers would be, I'll call it, the edges of the spectrum. There's a lot of seniors that would love to volunteer more. They have time.

But the other end is where I feel like so many churches may be missing some of the greatest discipleship and some of the greatest ministry opportunities of just with our students. Are we challenging our students to get in and serve? And I'll tell you, I've never seen in my lifetime a generation that wants to serve more than our students right now. And our church—I can make this statement with integrity—if you took away the students who are serving in our church today, our church would, like, shake and begin to crumble. That is how integral they are to everything we're doing. And that is a strategy of our student ministry from the very early ages of junior high, high school, even below, to say we want to get everyone engaged in serving. And they're doing incredible things. So I'd say our junior high in our junior-high ministry today, our worship is led by high-school students. Our kids’ ministry worship is being led by junior highers, and we're developing them. We just had a worship night last night at CCV. Two of the people that were on stage who are on staff now, leading worship for us for adults, started off as volunteers in our student ministry, and we just developed them. Now they're on staff. So it's that level of vision where you say we have to develop every volunteer at every level. But let's, for sure, not miss out on the power of student ministry, too, just for whoever needs to hear that. I think that’s a generation that has so much to offer.

Al: That's encouraging and certainly gives us hope for the next generation. That’s great, Ash. Thanks.

In this era of being always connected and always on social media or whatever it is, we also hear about the need for Sabbath and unplugging. Of course, this rhythm of life is clear in Scripture, yet church people are often the most overworked people. And oftentimes you say, “Well, when are you practicing the Sabbath?” you get blank stares from church staff. So not everybody can take a Sabbath on Sunday, but that's important. So I find it remarkable that in your Employee Engagement Survey, some of your top favorite items are that people have fun at work, and they help one another maintain life balance, two really great things. So practically speaking, how do you encourage your staff to find rest and not overwork, especially, you know, in a large multi-site church like yours? And how do you as leaders model this rhythm of life? Ashley, what's your perspective on that?

Ashley: Yeah. I think it comes back to, again, I’ll take it back to our culture, and this is a value of ours, and it's a value that would be deeply theological, too. Sometimes I'll get them in front of pastors, and I'll say, “Hey, let's look at the Ten Commandments. How many of you would willingly steal from your employer?” No hands go up. “How many of you would murder someone?” No hands go up. “How many of you want to actively take the Lord's name in vain?” Well, no. Nobody's doing that. “How many of you are going to lie tomorrow?” Nobody. No hands up. I say, “How many of you in the past six months have not taken one day off out of seven?” It's just so interesting to me that this is the one of the Ten Commandments that we're, like, okay breaking. And it’s actually the longest of the Ten Commandments. It’s the one that God had the most commentary on.

And so, you know, from a very, I’ll say, from a theological standpoint and a very practical standpoint, I truly believe our staff is more productive and God can bless our ministry more when we just honor our Sabbath. We're more productive. God designed our bodies to rest one day a week. So we just value it. And we honestly, if we find a staff member that's not taking a Sabbath, this becomes a same level of conversation if we found out that a staff member was doing something that we would say, like, “That's not okay for you to do.”

I'll give you as a personal example, and she wouldn't care me saying this, but years ago, when I hired my assistant, she had been doing another role on our staff. I found out that she was not taking a Sabbath. She worked seven days a week. And I just sat down with her. I’m like, “This is a value of ours. There's no way you should be working seven days a week.” And she would say, if you had her on this podcast, she would say, since she started taking her Sabbath, she'd say, “I am more rested. I'm more productive than I've ever been.”

So, again, i's a big value of ours that we really value for our staff. And it would be across the board anyone who wasn't taking it, it's a big deal for us.

Jeff: And it's not just, as Ash said, like, to win an award for being the best place to work and all that. It's just wise. It's not only biblical, it's just wise. I mean, look at Major League Baseball. They started, a long time ago, saying if a pitcher pitches 100 pitches, he will not pitch for the next four to five days. And they didn't do it for an award. They did it because they know if he doesn't rest up and we don't take care of the athlete, he is either going to have a season-ending injury or maybe even a career-ending injury. And we should take very serious if people burn out because we aren’t reinforcing Sabbath and refilling of their cup, that we should say I'd rather have a millstone around my neck than know I pushed someone out of ministry because I allowed them to just work, work, work, work, work, because the demand will always—there will never be enough supply in ministry to take care of the demand. But knowing when to and how to refill your cup…

I think for us, like Ash said, one of our fundamentals is how you create, protect, and respect boundaries. All three of those. You got to create your own. Then, you got to protect it like crazy. And then, you have to respect other people's. Like, our central teams that work Monday through Friday typically, and our campus teams take Friday off because we have Saturday and Sunday service, they can't drop a bomb on the campus teams at Thursday at 4 p.m. and say, “Hey, this is all changing this weekend. Good luck. See you later,” and they just mess with their Sabbath. That's not respecting somebody else's Sabbath.

So this takes a village of us working together to make sure our cups are refilled. And it's just, you know, we just got to be like Major League Baseball. We're the church. We need to be smart. We need to take care of our athletes. We need to make sure they’re ready to give their best. If they're going to give their best, they have to be at their best. So how can we ask them to give their best in ministry if they're not at their best because they're burning the candle at both ends?

Ash did a sermon series two years ago on John Mark Comer's book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. And that book was one of the most convicting books for me personally. And he talks about the four S’s, and slow down and Sabbath and solitude and simplification. And I have to tell you, the church needs more of John Mark Comer's approach than we think to stay healthy because we've got to be in this to fight the enemy and put our armor on and be out there ready to go.

So I feel like this is one area that it's easy, as Ash said, to let it linger because we wear a badge of courage sometimes of “Look at how much work I did. Well, I haven't taken a day off in 12 years.” You know, we wear it as a badge of courage, and in fact, we should be embarrassed. Jesus exemplified it. He slipped away to be with the Father. And He did not hesitate to walk away from the crowd, to be connected to the Father. That's what we need to do. We need to be connected to the vine. We need vine time because if our cup is empty, what good are we going to be to the church?

Al: And Jeff, you're also investing in other ways to give your staff rest and replenishment, as I understand.

Jeff: We are. We put together, a few years ago, five staff-health pillars. Those were just areas to focus on to keep us healthy. Financially, make sure that people are healthy financially and they’re managing budgets and doing all the right things to not get in debt. Make sure physically that they are okay. So we have things like 5K runs and pickleball tournaments, and we really encourage our staff—we have an agreement with our local gym that we pay a supplement to so that staff can get into a great gym at a great price. Spiritually, one of the areas it's crazy of our five pillars, the spiritual pillar, believe it or not, when we took a survey, was one of the lowest scoring. And so remembering that for people, what is your quiet time? What are you doing? We can't assume they're having that time. We've got to really challenge them to make sure they're having that dedicated time in the Word to do that. And then, relationships. One of our relationship pillars, we've spent a lot of time this past year or so on marriages for our staff, making sure that we have marriage retreats. You know, every second year we pay for someone to go to the family-life marriage retreat so that they can invest in their marriage. This year, we sponsored a marriage night for our whole staff, and we brought Les and Leslie Parrott in, and we really pushed our team on, do you have a marriage plan? Do you have date nights? Are you really working on growing your marriage? And we do things called flex days for our staff that work six days a week. Because we have the weekends, we intentionally put in a flex day that said, “Hey, on average, every other week, you got to have a day outside of Sabbath to do the things of life. If not, go to the doctor, get your car washed, go to Costco. If not, you’re not going to have a Sabbath on your day off; you’re just going to go do chores.” And we want them to have a Sabbath, not just a day off. We want them to have Sabbath and that time with the Father.

So, those are a few things that we've done. But I have to tell you, the most important thing for those listening is please have a plan for staff health. I mean, if you don't have an intentional plan and you just assume they're going to be healthy, it's not going to be a good outcome. And we don't own their staff health. We've told them so many times we do not and cannot own this for you. All we can do is create an environment to encourage it, challenge it, and allow it to happen. But you have to own this. And so that's something that we also have to understand. If someone chooses to burn out, I can say with honesty it wasn't because we didn't allow it; they just didn't make it a priority, and they didn't protect those boundaries.

Al: That's great advice. Thanks so much.

You know, in the greater Phoenix area, you're seeing rapid growth. And growth can be great, and it can also introduce challenges as you're committed to a shared vision and culture of your church community. So how have you seen growth in your region impact your ministry, especially in the last few years? And as we've come out of the pandemic, church involvement isn't necessarily the same as it was before the pandemic, as we've heard a lot of stories in the past couple of years. So where are you seeing positive energy, and what are some of the challenges that you see ahead?

Ashley: I’ll give you a few thoughts, Al. I think, you know, Phoenix has been, it has been a growing region, a growing city, and we think there's a lot of opportunities in front of us, I would say from a high-level standpoint, if I just gave you my perspective on where we're at. And I would say this isn't just to pertain to Phoenix; I would say this pertains to when I talk to pastors across the states. I think we're in one of the greatest environments for evangelistic growth we've been in in the past hundred years, or I would just say in my lifetime. What I think has happened is the pandemic, I think, took a lot of things away from people. I think they quickly got it back with stimulus and things coming back to normal. And I think that whiplash, I think spiritually what happened is it helped show, it took things away people used as a crutch. They got it all back pretty quickly, and I think they still felt empty. And so I think we are spiritually in a place where people are more open to the Gospel than I've seen. And I think the churches that are staying on mission right now, on really caring about their staff, their culture, and being evangelistic, I think are seeing a lot of growth.

I just got back a month ago from a gathering of some of the largest churches in the country, the senior pastors got together. And I would say, I’ve gathered with that group for the past 10 years or so, and it's the most I've seen that group excited about some of the growth they're seeing right now. So we really do have an opportunity in front of us. But I think a lot of the things we've talked about in this podcast, Al, are things that are going to help the churches stay on mission, with excellence, making a difference.

Al: Yeah. I appreciate that.

And Jeff, how about your perspective on serving in a growing area like this?

Jeff: Yeah. One of the things that Ash has both shared from stage and with our staff is there's so much divisiveness and division in our country, in our world. And that is why this opportunity, if the church can be united, it's going to actually start to look attractive, because, you know, we used to be the “no” list. Here's God's list of “don't do's.” “Don't do this. Don't do that. Go to church and find out what you shouldn't do.” And so you went there to get bombarded with shame. And I think in this environment that we're in, people are so drawn towards unity. And if we can present the Gospel in a way that says, “Man, Jesus sees you just as you are, not as you should be, and this is a safe place,” growth is going to happen. And we've seen this crazy growth. Like, we can't explain it. We can say all day long that it’s because we have great programs and preaching and worship. And we do. But God has done a move, and now having over 48,000 people on a weekend, it's not us. It's the hurting needing a place to come and find a place of “Can I just be who I am and be accepted, and you will love me enough to push me to my next steps?”

And so there is this crazy, you know, the church, we always, Ash always says, “We're no longer the home team. We’re the visiting team.” Now we're actually not even in the—we're in the stands. I don't even think we're a visiting team anymore in today's world. But people want that so bad, that’s why we’re seeing so much growth. And I think the biggest thing for us is to not lose sight of the fact that we have one responsibility, and that is to make sure people can be cared for, they can feel connected, and we can challenge them in their Jesus journey, just challenge them on their next steps. If we do that, the growth is going to continue, and it's not because of us. It's because this world needs a Savior, and it's more evident than it's ever been.

Al: Yeah. To be united. Somewhere it says, they'll know us by our love, the way we love one another. Yeah.

Well, guys, this has been a great conversation. Thanks so much for your investment of the time. I just love talking about what are the pillars of your culture, and how do you focus on continuing to keep such a healthy culture so that church can thrive. And I love the conversations around leadership development, not only for staff but also for volunteers, and the development of residents, for example, where you've had 400 residents go through your leadership program, 82 of them now employees at the church. And what a great pathway that is. And how you intentionally create momentum and how that really benefits the staff, and some of the techniques that you use. You talk about vulnerability and transparency as you talk with your staff and as you do the work that you do so well. And to have one on ones and to ask, assess, and advise, as the three A's, and those one on ones. And how you work with volunteers and the importance of not only recruiting volunteers but developing them. And it's a staff person's job to do that, not to actually do the work itself. And the importance of Sabbath. Wow, this has just been a great conversation. Thanks so much.

Is there anything you'd like to add that we've talked about? Ashley, give us a thought.

Ashley: Al, I think the only last thought I would have is as a pastor, there's so many places that you can pour your energy into. Even all the things we talked about today, there's so many things you might want to go take away. And I just want to keep encouraging leaders and pastors to invest in the culture of their organization. It truly is, that is where we are spending a disproportionate amount of our energy as we grow is we believe culture is what creates the momentum we all want. And that starts with us as leaders modeling it, and it starts with us reinforcing with our staff and our congregation. But our culture really matters. So I want to keep encouraging people to invest in that.

And this isn't a plug. Al, you didn't ask me to do this. I just think this Best Christian Workplaces’ Survey has been something that has truly improved our culture over time, and I want to thank you for what you do.

Al: Yea. Thanks, Ashley.

Jeff: Al, I would say, too, as I think about, and by the way, I agree with this idea that you are like a laboratory crucible. You have provided a way for us to dip the litmus paper in and let us know if it's pink or blue. Do we need to work harder? Do we need to work less? So that has been so helpful for us.

In addition to the culture, which I 100% agree with Ash, the one thing I would challenge churches to think about is nimbleness. Don't fall in love with a strategy that got you where you are. What got you here won't get you there. In today’s world, here’s what I know for sure: change is necessary to be relevant, and relevance is necessary to create impact. So you have to be willing to change. You have to be nimble and willing to make some changes to have impact on this world that needs Jesus. So just because it used to be done that way or you fell in love with the strategy you created, be nimble and humble enough to say, “I want to allow change to stay relevant to make impact.”

Ashley: That’s good.

Al: Well, Ashley and Jeff, thanks so much for your contributions today. And mostly, again, I appreciate your commitment to sharing the Good News of Jesus and equipping your flock for ministry. So thanks so much for your time and speaking into the lives of so many listeners. Thanks.

Ashley: Thanks, Al.

Al: Well, thanks so much for listening to my conversation with Ashley Wooldridge and Jeff Osborne. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

You can find ways to connect with them and links to everything we discussed in the show notes and transcript at workplaces.org/podcast.

And if you have any suggestions for me about our podcast or have any questions on flourishing workplace cultures, please email me, al@workplaces.org.

As we close today’s podcast, remember that creating a flourishing, Christ-centered culture takes intentionality and action. Take the time to assess the health of your team and organization by using tools like the Best Christian Workplaces’ Employee Engagement Survey. We'll give you the insights needed to strengthen your leadership, engage your staff, and align your culture with your mission. Don't wait. Start investing in the health of your organization today. Visit workplaces.org to learn more and to take the next step in leading a thriving, engaged team.

And you won't want to miss my conversation next week with the transformational leader Kendra VanderMeulen, the CEO, president of the National Christian Foundation, headquartered in Atlanta.

Outro: The Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast is sponsored by Best Christian Workplaces. If you need support building a flourishing workplace culture, please visit workplaces.org for more information.

We'll see you again next week for more valuable content to help you develop strong leaders and build a flourishing workplace culture.