Transcript: Flourishing Culture as a Foundation for One of the Fastest Growing Churches // Jeff Cranston, LowCountry Community Church

Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast

Flourishing Culture as a Foundation for One of the Fastest Growing Churches

April 3, 2023

Jeff Cranston

Intro: Are you looking for a lever that will help your organization grow? Our guest today is a church leader who is experiencing tremendous growth post-COVID. Listen in as he explains the foundation for his church's flourishing culture and ministry growth.

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: Hello, I'm Al Lopus, the co-founder of the Best Christian Workplaces and the author of the book Road to Flourishing: Eight Keys to Boost Employee Engagement and Well-Being. And as you know, I'm passionate about helping Christian leaders create engaged, even flourishing workplaces.

And today on the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast, we'll learn from a lead pastor shepherding a church that with a thriving, yes, even highly flourishing workplace culture, they've continued to learn and grow in staff engagement, and rather than rest employees be even more engaged and flourishing.

So I'm delighted to welcome Jeff Cranston to the podcast today. Jeff is the lead pastor of LowCountry Community Church in Bluffton, South Carolina, near Hilton Head. Jeff, thanks for joining us on the Flourishing Culture Podcast.

Jeff Cranston: Thank you, Al. And it's really an honor to be here. I appreciate what you all do. You've helped us so much, and to be able to talk about it with you is a—that's a real gift, so thank you.

Al: Oh, I’m really looking forward to our conversation. And Jeff, as we've talked, and as I've seen your Employee Engagement Surveys, even some of your thoughts about this, I know that we're brothers of the same cloth, so I'm looking forward to our conversation.

So let's start with you've been there for 25 years. I mean, this is not a new gig for you. So 25 years. Your team has participated now twice in our Employee Engagement Survey, in 2021 and 2022. So the question clearly is, well, why did you and your leadership team decide it was time to assess your employee engagement, and what did you hope to learn from the process?

Jeff: Well, I can only say I wish we had done it a lot sooner. We planned on doing it prior to COVID, and then COVID hit, and then all of our energy, like everybody's energy, went into just keeping the doors open. And so when we came out of COVID, we were all assessing, okay, what's left? And you had a real chance to rebuild at that point because it was sort of everybody's Etch-A-Sketch got erased, and you could fix some things. It made change a little bit easier. We were part of the great resignation as well. And so we had some staff leave.

And so my executive pastor, Jason Best, and I said, “Okay, let's just find out where we're at in terms of staff engagement and staff culture, staff health.” And quite frankly, I didn't think it was going to be that great, but I was not really concerned about that as much as I was I just wanted us to have a baseline and a foundation from which we could work. And the evaluative tools and the Survey that everybody took, that really provided that for us. The FLOURISH model, I think, is just genius because it's so well balanced, and it gave us a wonderful, accurate picture of where we were in key areas.

Al: Yeah, thanks. Well, we're going to talk about another model that's balanced a little later, I think. But, you know, we work with a lot of different organizations, so we're able to help individual churches like you kind of get an idea of where you are relative to peer churches. And in your first year, the results showed that you were highly engaged and qualified as a certified best Christian workplace, even flourishing. And then, you came back for the second year, and your scores improved even more. And now almost 90% of your staff are in our engaged category. And I think of the difference between 90% engaged and rowing in the same direction, really going well, versus the average in churches of, like, 56% or so. That's got to be huge, a huge difference.

So let's get into one of your key areas, and one of those is healthy communication. So share with our listeners how your team approaches communications between departments. I mean, this is really one of your strengths. Are there some specific practices that help people who serve in different aspects of the ministry, how they feel heard and understand?

Jeff: We have a culture code that we adopted last year, and our staff had a big part in creating that. And one of the things that is in our culture code is that we're loyal to one another. And here's what we said, just three sentences: “We have each other's back and believe in each other's abilities. The foundation of our loyalty is trust. Therefore, we lean on and reinforce one another.” And here's what the next sentence gets, I think, to this question: “We neither allow nor accept a colleague to be siloed or soloed.” So no solo, no silo. Most things here are not siloed, and when we start to feel like they are getting that way, we kind of pull it back in. Now, some things just have to be, but we want everybody to not be siloed or feel like they're out there on their own doing something.

So any time we do, whether it's a new ministry, Al, or a new—well, it doesn’t even have to be new—if we're evaluating a current ministry or whatever, all the people that are involved in that, even in a corollary way, we pull them all into a room, and we start right there with them. We throw ideas out. Everybody gets a chance to be heard. We even have designed some spaces in our facility rooms, that some are mid-sized, some are rather small and intimate, and they're designed for those kinds of meetings and those kinds of conversations.

And we also get everybody—we meet as an executive team, myself and my executive pastor, Jason. Every single department meets with primarily Jason or myself one on one. We see everybody once a month, and we check in with them, and it gives them a chance to share where they're at, what they're doing.

We've got a thing—and I don't understand it all, but it's an app, and apparently, it works really well, and it keeps everybody on the same page. So we communicate through that as well. It's got a form on there whenever we're doing an event or a ministry or whatever it is, and what happens is everybody who's involved in that sees that, that's added to, as things progress, you see that. And so everybody has a really good idea of where we are at all times. And that came about, Al, because, you know, you pull everybody together in a room, the two or three people or the one department would take the ball and run with it, and then nobody else heard about it again until right before it's time to do it. And then you find out there was misunderstanding, miscommunication. This has taken a lot of that away for us. They can track the progress of what's happening all the time, and that's been really good. So we use in-person meetings, we use technology to keep people in the loop.

Al: Yeah. Well, those are four things. That's fascinating. So you developed a culture code, and then what I heard was that you and your executive pastor just didn't sit down in the room and create it yourself; you actually got a lot of input with your staff on this culture code. And I love this, being loyal to one another where the foundation is trust, where there's no solo, no silo. I mean, you're doing this together, and then you're doing things to reinforce that. You're pulling people together to evaluate ministry.

Now, so what's unique about the room that—or rooms—that you've designed for collaborative communication? Is it a round table or…?

Jeff: Well, we've got different—most everybody in their offices, if we do it in their offices—I shouldn't say most—but many of our full-time people have a monitor screen in there. So whatever we're working on, you can pull it up. Everybody can see the same thing at the same time. In one of the rooms, we've got a really big, long table that somebody here at church made. And so we can sit about a dozen people around that. I sat at it today. We have another small room where three or four can meet, and it's more intimate. It's kind of like a mini den. So we can have those meetings in there. We find that meetings in those rooms sometimes are more productive than meetings in offices. They're nothing major, but they do help.

Al: Yeah. All right, thanks. Well, then, also, monthly department meetings with you or executive pastor, and you're using technology. Yeah. We're going to have to check out ClickUp and see what that's all about. But, yeah, great. Those are four great things to help with communications.

So as we came out of the pandemic, some employees started looking around for opportunities. Like, we've heard a lot about the great resignation, certainly churches. And you've now even said you weren't immune to this trend. But your team has just showed remarkable growth in our outstanding-talent items, and especially, we asked the question about retention: we retain our best employees. And you scored really high on that. So what are some of the practical steps that you and your leadership team took to focus on retaining your top talent? I mean, that's so critical for the healthy functioning of any organization. So what have you done? How’s it been helpful to the ministry?

Jeff: I think if you talk to our folks, they will tell you that they feel heard, they feel cared for, they feel like we care for their families. When I meet with our leadership-team people, my meeting with them is generally, maybe, I would say less than half of it is in regard to ministry. But we begin with, how are you? How's your wife, or how's your husband? How are the kids? And so you want to go with treating people as people before you have to deal with them as an employee.

Giving people a voice and developing that culture code was huge for us last year. And we keep that in front of our staff. We often will quote from it at a weekly staff meeting. And we really do seek to live out what we all agreed to when we created that.

Also, we have a leadership team, which comprises me and executive pastor, and then key department heads and other pastors and directors, and we rotate that every six months. And they have a voice and the direction of the ministries of our church when they sit on leadership team. We found that rotating that, it gives you fresh insight, it brings in new blood, but every one of them on there are so good and so helpful. And you know if one or two step out and you miss their input, well, I know six months from now, we're going to get them back in play again. So that's been really, really helpful.

We do our best to keep people in the loop on most things, and technology helps with that, our one on ones help with that. I think it was John Maxwell said people are not usually down on what they're up on. And so that, just keeping people, “Okay, I know what we're doing. I know why we're doing it. I know where this is headed. I know how this fits into the overall direction and vision of the church.”

Another thing we do, Al, is we get together every Thursday. During the winter months, we get together for lunch, and so one of our guys cooks out. We've had low-country boil. We've had hot dogs. We’ve had hamburgers and sausages. And it's just, we all just gather. And, you know, in our facilities here, you may go around all day Thursday and not see but two or three people, and then all of a sudden, they all start appearing from out of nowhere. I didn't even know they were in the building that day. And we just sit down and have a 30-, 40-minute meal together. When it's hotter, in the hotter months—we're getting ready to switch over here soon—we have snow cones every Thursday at three o’clock.

So as the week is winding down, it gives us a chance to just get everybody together. It's a fun time. There's no agenda. We just get to hang out and get out of the work mode.

You know, in terms of keeping them, we pay well, and we pay competitively. And I think that's really important. And whenever I think, “Well, I don't know if we can go that far this year,” or whatever, we always say, “Well, how much would it cost to replace them?” And it's usually a whole lot more, right? And so we try to keep them happy at that area.

And then, I think two more things very quickly is provide our staff with the tools that they need to be the most effective in what they're called to do. And in the creative arts and technical-arts department, that can get pretty expensive. You know, the technology, everybody knows who's listening, it's a black hole, and always, things need to be upgraded and so forth. But we do our very best to provide them with the tools.

And then, the last thing, Al—and we really do believe in this. And we certainly don't hit it 100%, but we attempt it—is that we encourage everybody to get a coach and get yourself coached up. That's one side of the coin. The other side of the coin is be a coach. So get somebody above you that can help you do what you're called to do. And then, find somebody that wants to be where you are. Help them. So get a coach, and be a coach. And we budget that for our staff. Some of them, they get on airplanes to go get coached. And I'm in a coaching group myself right now. Some years I have a one-on-one coach, and other years I'm in a coaching group. And then, I coach guys as well.

So I think that gives you a sense as a team member here that they care enough about me to help me improve, and they see enough in me that they think I can help others. And when you have that sense when you go to work somewhere, I think that helps you stay, because you're valued, and we want people to know that they're valued.

Al: That you care enough about me to help me improve, and that you value me enough to think that I can coach others. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Well, I’d say, Jeff, those are about ten items of how to retain top talent, no question about it. I think that's going to be in a chapter in a book someday. Yeah. But great idea.

Another area churches struggle with, and that's true during COVID, is sustainable strategy. And sometimes it's hard to really clarify the vision and the goals of the church so that people all, again, focused and moving in the same direction. And, you know, this is an area that showed tremendous growth for your staff from the first year to the second year of the Survey. So I know that you did something there intentional to really move it forward. So how did you and others on your leadership team focus on strategy and goals? Are there some specific practices that you initiated to really help all of the other leaders as well as all of your staff in this area?

Jeff: Since you mentioned COVID, all of us, whether we're leading a school or a church or an organization, whatever, we had to move and pivot from just staying open—that was a year and a half—just, how are we going to stay open? And quite frankly, I don't know how it was for everybody else, but for us mission and vision and strategy, I felt like it got put on the back burner, because all of our horsepower went into an online presence and getting people back and all of the protocols, and it just required so much. But then, we tried to move out of that as quickly as we could, quite frankly.

And then, I can almost remember the week I felt like, “Okay, I'm able to now look up again and see ahead, and I haven't been able to do that.” And one of our scores, the first time that we went through the Survey, and I was really bummed by this score, one of our lower scores was our staff team understood our mission, because that's, like, my thing, and the vision. And we scored so low, and I was despondent over that. And I got to thinking, “Well, cut yourself a little bit of a break here, because for the last 12, 18 months, we've just been trying to stay open. We haven't had a chance to really talk about vision.” Our vision is to get back to normal, and then we realized that's an impossibility. There is going to be no going back to the way it used to be. So we've got to go ahead in some other areas.

But I think, to answer your question, keep it simple in terms of strategy. Don't overcomplicate things. Man, can we overcomplicate stuff. So we just try to keep our goals and our strategy understandable, and we keep them in front of our staff.

Now, when I came here years ago, I brought with me the five purposes from the Purpose Driven Church. We weren’t, like, all in, 210% on everything. But I really believe those five purposes—and the words that we use here are connect, grow, reach, serve, and worship. And they're all based out of Matthew 22 and Matthew 28 and Acts 1. I just find them to be really biblical. And so what we did, Al, as we came out of COVID, I just said, “Okay, let's just reset.” And I've got a great team. I have an incredible executive pastor, incredible. I would wish him on any lead pastor. I hope, if you're a lead pastor listening, I hope you get a Jason Best one day. But we just went back to basics, and let's make sure we're helping people connect to each other and connect to God. Let's make sure we're helping people grow in their faith. Let's make sure we're providing avenues for people to serve God. Let's make sure we're teaching people how to share their faith. And let's make sure we are a worshiping community.

And I have found for years and years, I think there's genius in all of that because it's biblical, and it forces us to stay balanced because if it was up to me, we would be a church of connect and grow, and the other things would get a little bit of a, yeah, we'd give it some time, but we wouldn't give it a whole lot of time. But we really became intentional.

And I think, to go back to your question, some practices we initiated, I think we just went back to what we started with, because there was a sense for all of us. We were having to rebuild and start all over.

And the other thing that we did, Al, and we're trying to maintain this because we minister to thousands of people every week, but we had to adopt again a church-planting mindset. So I had to start thinking more from instead of megachurch to church plant. And that forces you to say, “Okay, what's really important, and what do we have to do?” And we went back to the basics, and that was so helpful to us. Of course, we talked all that through with our staff and kept that in front of them. But I think, don't overcomplicate things. You know what you're good at; strengthen your strengths. Don't spend a ton of time and energy and money on your weaknesses. Strengthen your strengths, and move on. And God will help you to do that.

Al: I trust you’re enjoying our podcast today. We’ll be right back after an important word for leaders.

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Now, welcome back to my conversation with Jeff Cranston at LowCountry Community Church.

During COVID and now after COVID, we've heard a lot about pastor burnout. And so, you know, I ask this question sometimes: what are some of your personal spiritual practices that keep you filled? You know, I only believe that we can give what we have. So how do you encourage your leadership, your team, and staff to nurture their own spiritual growth as well?

Jeff: Yeah. One writer I read many years ago, he said be careful where you get your supply from because ministry will drain you to the dregs. I'm not sure what dregs are, but I know what he meant when he said that. I purposely find time to be solitary and to be alone. To be solitary, you've got to be a little bit ruthless with your schedule, and you have to say no to things. But just the way I'm wired, I need that. I have about two days a week where I rarely speak to more than three or four human beings, and that's—all the introverts out there are like, “Yes! I'm so happy to hear somebody say that.” But it's good for me.

I listen to a lot of—I love music, so music helps me to just fill me. And then, just time in the Word. When you're preaching and teaching all the time—I had a professor in college named Dr. Terry Powell, and he told me one time, I've never forgotten, he said, “Jeff, make sure that the Bible never becomes a textbook, but rather, a table from which you feast.” And I have remembered that for almost 40 years now. And so I try to keep that in front of my mind.

I've just started using, in terms of a tool to help me in my own devotional life, there's a new book out by Jonathan Gibson. I think Crossway publishes it. It's called Be Thou My Vision: A Liturgy for Daily Worship. And I'm finding myself, the older I get—and I grew up Southern Baptist, so liturgy, we didn't even know what that word meant, and I didn’t know what a liturgy was—but I’m finding, the older I get, I really appreciate the structure of a liturgy. And so this book is 31 days of set liturgy, and you can repeat it monthly. So the order is fixed and repeated for every day, but the contents of the order and the Bible reading every day are different. And so I really like that. And I've been doing that kind of devotional time for quite a few years now. So in my regular day and life, I'm an evangelical, and in my private time, I'm sort of Episcopalian, in terms of how I do it. But I find it works for me.

And the other thing I do, Al, is I take three or four nights away once a quarter. I go to the mountains. I'll go somewhere away from where I live. It's usually three to four nights, and I do that time for reflection, reading, prayer, study, and that refills the tank.

And as far as our staff, this may sound funny to some, but I check in with them to make sure that they're worshiping weekly. I think people will be stunned to know how many church-staff members never make it into a church service. I mean, never make it in. And I think that's really unhealthy for your spiritual life. So we do everything we can to make sure that they're there, and they're engaged, and they're not having to work at everything every time. And for some that's easier to do than others. And then, in my times with certain staff members, when I meet with them , I just talk about how things are going spiritually and whether they're tired, whether they're refreshed, those sorts of things.

Al: Yeah. Right. That's great.

Well, so now let's just look ahead for the next few years, and you look at, you see the opportunities and challenges as—I love the way, after COVID you kind of looked up for the first time because you could instead of just worrying about the, what are we going to do tomorrow? So again, you've already got a flourishing workplace, a highly engaged team. How do you steward this strength into the future for Kingdom impact?

Jeff: Your questions are really good. They really are. They really made me think.

Al: Thanks, Jeff.

Jeff: I think I'll go back to what I said earlier. We strengthen our strengths, and we move from strength to strength. So at this point, our church will be 30 years old next year. We began in 1994. We know what we're good at, and we know what we're not good at. And so we just try to keep adding horsepower to the things that we're good at.

And I think moving forward, too, Al, we have to keep our eyes open and our heads up. When an organization or a church becomes navel-gazing, that’s deadly. It's absolutely deadly. So we have staffed intentionally, we have people on staff whose job is to make sure that we keep looking out. You can call them outreach, you can call them missions, whatever you want to call them, and they're doing a great job. And they help us stay involved in the community. So we call it, here, there, and over there. Local missions, regional and national missions, international missions. And again, balance, trying to stay balanced, developing relationships with all those folks. And then the needs, the needs just pop up. And then you can say, “Okay, is this something that's part of who we are? Can we meet this need? Can we meet it really well? If so, let's roll up our sleeves, and let's jump in and get involved.”

And one example would be our involvement in Dolly Parton's Imagination Library. And we provide as a church a book every month for every child in our county, from birth up until they’re five years old. So they get a book in the mail every month, and we're sponsoring that. And that's just been a really good connection point for us with the public schools, the private schools, the libraries. I mean, everybody has been totally on board to helping us in this and getting the word out and so forth. So we have—I hate to give a number—but I think we're over 2,000 children that are getting a book every month from that. I'm pretty sure that's right. We're right at that or right near it. And that's just been very satisfying.

And another thing that's been so good, and this is part of the outreach, one of the least-churched or -reached subcultures in our community is the special-needs community. So we just recently hosted our second Night to Shine event with the Tim Tebow Foundation, and it was an incredible event. We had so much fun. And we had 82 honored guests and their families. We were able to just care for them.

So these kind of things, Al, keep us looking out, looking up. Who can we minister to? Who can we reach? Who can we just love on?

And the corollary to that, in an event like Night to Shine, we had 320 volunteers help make that happen, and we had to cut off people volunteering at 320. We had more that wanted to be a part of that. Now, that never happens in church world. It never happens here. But for this it does. And people feel they're part of something greater, and you see the joy on people that have tended to be overlooked in our culture. And we are making them kings and queens that night. And it's given us open opportunities to carry on relationally with many of those families.

Al: What great examples. I have to say, Jeff, when I listened to you talk about, oh, Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, it’s like, “So you're sending kids books for literacy, and who's not going to like that?” I mean, it really is fantastic in the special needs Night to Shine.

Jeff: When you see, Al, when you see, and this was eye opening for us, there is a direct correlation. The higher the literacy rate, the less percentage that child is going to wind up in prison. It's incredible. And we went, “That's it? We can do this.” And Dolly Parton's name opens a lot of doors. I don't know. She's just magical something. I don't know. But we've been received with open arms in the community and the county. And it's just our county. We're not trying to do it for the state. It’s just our county, right here where we live. But it's a good impact. And what kid gets anything in the mail any more these days? So every month they're excited. “Hey, you got something in the mail today,” and they know a new book's coming.

Al: And it's coming from a church. Yeah.

Jeff: Yeah.

Al: And so, you know, it makes them ask the next question, “Who are they, and can I go there?” I mean, hopefully, I'm sure, you're seeing benefits from that.

Jeff: Yeah. And they come, and kids, man, it looks like somebody kicked over an anthill every Sunday morning. We get there, little kids running everywhere, and we love it.

Al: That's fantastic. Well, LowCountry, it's not surprised that you've been noted as one of the 100 fastest-growing churches in America by Outreach magazine in 2022. And many churches are just struggling to get people engaged again after this pandemic. People are staying at home. They're watching church in their pajamas. Here's our bottom-line question that I often wonder: can you draw a connection between your flourishing staff culture and your high level of engagement and how you're seeing engagement and growth in the church community? So are you seeing a connection? What are a couple of the factors that you see that have impacted the growth of your church?

Jeff: Again, a really good question. I never, I don't know that I've ever sat and thought about making that connection, but people respond to leadership. And I think when our people see and sense a total buy in from our team, they tend to follow. If they see us excited, they're excited. If they see us talking about, hear us talking about it, they're talking about it. There's the old saying, a rising tide lifts all boats. And I think leadership has a lot to do with that.

As far as the growth, I've never concentrated on growth. You know, when we came here in the late ‘90s, it was sort of a restart of a church, and there were about 80 people here. And I never concentrated on growth. I always have tried to concentrate on health because healthy things grow. It's true for children. It's true for the flora and fauna. It's true for an organization. If you're healthy, you will grow. Healthy cells in our body duplicate other healthy cells and so forth. So I think when we're healthy and we exude that health and that joy and—you know, if you were to come here to church on a Sunday in our concourse between service, man, it is life. It is lively. It's a little bit loud at times. There’s people everywhere, standing around talking, having coffee. There’s just so much energy. And people remark about that to us. Well, that's not anything you can really create outside of health, you know?

You know you're in an unhealthy church when as soon as the church service is over, they're gone. I mean, they are gone so fast. And so we love having to flick the lights and, “Hey, get out of here. We got to get more people in for the next service” type of thing.

But I think when your team is together, your team is unified, your team is healthy, that has really positive repercussions, and people pick up on that, and people want to be around that. We don't want to be around the opposite of any of that, do we? So I think just working on those things. And when you're healthy and your staff is healthy, your church is healthy, because I've seen over the years, just my own personal view, the smaller the church, Satan will attack the church; the larger the church, again, just my personal experience, Satan attacks the staff because if he gets the staff, he's got the church. And so if we can keep the staff—you know, we pray together as a staff on Sunday mornings, Tuesday mornings, and Thursday mornings. And as long we can keep praying together, loving each other, taking care of each other, healthy, keeping everybody engaged and on the same page and looking forward and understanding the vision and mission, growth is just going to be a byproduct of all of that.

Al: Amen. Yeah. Never focused on growth. That's fascinating. But focused on health, and healthy things grow. I mean, that is just a fact of life.

Well, well, Jeff, I also know that you have a heart as a pastor, but also for people to understand the truth of scripture and how they live the scripture out in their daily life. So you’ve got a podcast, Kitchen Table Theology. Gosh, that’s attractive, just the title of it. So how are you working to deepen people's understanding of God and the Bible in a culture that we all know seems increasingly unaware of biblical truth, and it clearly doesn't have a foundation in the Bible?

Jeff: Well, I really appreciate you asking about that. Thank you. And that was something I just dove into. I didn't know anything about a podcast except from listening to them. And it was April of 2020, and we were all sitting around, going, “Well, I got nothing to do here. I can't go out.” So many “I cant’s.” But when, Al, it was a perfect time to start a podcast, April of 2020, I've since found out the worst year to start a podcast, Al, was 2020, and the worst month of that year was April. So we did the worst timing on that.

I had just read—and it had been something I've been wanting to do, but I didn't know anybody who could even, like, coach me in doing a podcast. But every two years, Ligonier Ministries and Lifeway Research do a state of theology in the American church. They do a survey every two years. Well, I got my hands on the 2021, and it rocked me. I found out that half of evangelicals agree that God learns and adapts to different circumstances, which is totally opposite of the doctrine of immutability. There's 56% of evangelicals agreed with this: God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. And I'm like, “Wait, what?” And then the one that really got me, when asked whether they agreed with this statement, “Jesus was a great teacher, but not God,” 43% of American evangelicals answered yes.

So I thought, “Okay, I got to do something. I can't throw all of the starfish back in the ocean, but I can throw a few back, right, where I am.” And so we started this thing. So I just, for the first 100 or so episodes, I just taught simply, with a co-host, systematic theology. We did the Doctrine of God, the Doctrine of Christ, we did the doctrine of sin, the eschatology. We did all the “ologies” in systematic theology. And lo and behold, we started to get an audience, and it's just started to grow and grow and grow. And we're now 100 and almost to our 150th podcast. And it's been so good. And I did it primarily for my people here. But at the end of the year, we got results, sort of a summary result, which I'm sure you get from the people that you work with on your podcast. And we had reached 39 nations. I'm like, “What? I'm just, it's me sitting at my desk.” But we just try to teach biblical theology.

And the kitchen-table part of it is I just want people to picture we just sat down with a cup of coffee at the kitchen table, and we started talking about things of God. And so our tagline is “Putting the theological cookies on the bottom shelf,” because people are so intimidated by theology. “I can’t understand. It's too much for me to grasp,” etc., etc. So we just try to break it down, keep it simple, again, don't overcomplicate it. It is hugely important, but we've got to know what we believe. And the American church increasingly is spiritually schizophrenic. I mean, we just don't know. We bounce from one thing to the next. So we’re just trying to help people gain a good, solid Biblical knowledge.

Al: Yeah. Great stories. That's so helpful. And yes, it is amazing, when you get those reports of who’s actually listening and where they are, it's amazing how far the reach is. Yeah.

Well, Jeff, this has really been a great conversation. Thanks so much. We've learned so much, you know. And I think about just actionable things that our audience can be thinking about, just as I look back on our conversation. First of all, the culture code, to get your people to kind of create a culture code about how you're going to treat one another in the workplace. I love your “to be loyal to one another” and where their foundation is trust, where there's no silos and nobody’s solo. You're caring for each other. But again, the way you’ve developed a really proactive communication approach, involving people, how you're talking with your teams on a monthly basis. You're using technology. And your ten retention keys from paying well to get a coach, be a coach, to all of those items, really actionable, very helpful. And then, you know, your strategy. I love the connect, grow, serve, reach, and worship, the balanced approach in all of those, and how that's great in just keeping. And I think if all pastors had quarterly retreats and really thought of the Word as a banquet table, what a great way of thinking about it. But think of the future, moving from strength to strength, being balanced in your approach, and being involved in things that really are meaningful to not only your congregants, but your community. From the Night to Shine, the Dolly Parton book Imagination Library, just really great examples. But then, the bottom line, focus on health. Healthy things grow, and healthy teams, then, certainly create positive repercussions for the staff. And boy, that was just a great bottom line.

So as we think about all we've talked about, how about a bottom-line response from you, what you’ve thought about, Jeff?

Jeff: Well, again, thank you so much. I hope I haven't talked too much, but I get so excited about all of this. I just, I love this. I would just want to encourage everybody listening, again, I go back to what I said a number of times. Don't overcomplicate things. Find a strategy that's God given, that works in your cultural context, and then, just blow it out of the water. Do what works where you are, and God will help you, and God will provide for you. We've taken so many huge steps of faith here. We have beautiful facilities here. We've never been in debt. They're all debt free. We stepped out in faith so many times. And I'll just say to the leaders who are listening, if you're not going to bed a half a dozen times, if you're not going to bed at night a half dozen times a year, something's wrong, without freaking out is what I'm trying to say. You lay there at night and go, “What have I done? Where am I leading these people to? What have I gotten myself into?” That's a good thing for a leader. It's terrible when you're going through it, but you're in the faith zone, I think, at that point. Now, there's a fine line between faith and presumption, but you just trust God with some things way bigger than yourself. I think it was William Carey. He said, “Attempt something,”—was it Carey?—“Attempt something so great for God that if God not be in it, it's doomed to fail.” It was either Carey or Moody, I can't remember. But, you know, try to live on the edge of that, and love your people. Just love your people, even when they're driving you crazy. Love your people. Let them know they're loved. Concentrate on health. And the repercussions that come out of all that, you'll look back and go, “Man, look at what God did.”

Al: Well, Jeff, thanks for your contributions today. Really fantastic. Most of all, I appreciate your commitment to serving God's Kingdom through the local church. You're leading a community where people can connect with others through the life-changing message of Jesus Christ. And I want to thank you for taking time out of your day and speaking into the lives of so many listeners. Thanks, Jeff.

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.

Al: And I can't wait for next week's episode. I'll be talking with Jason Rachels, the superintendent of one of the largest Christian schools in the country, with nearly 2,000 students. Learn how Jason has led Calvary Christian Academy in Fort Lauderdale to a flourishing culture, educating tomorrow's leaders for Christ. And also, please invite your Christian-school superintendent to listen as well.