Transcript: How a Top 100 Church Transformed Its Culture from Unhealthy to Flourishing // Jesse DeYoung, Flatirons Community Church

Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast

“How a Top 100 Church Transformed Its Culture from Unhealthy to Flourishing“

February 24, 2025

Jesse DeYoung

Intro: Is your workplace culture just surviving or truly flourishing? Well, many leaders struggle with unhealthy dynamics that drain energy and mission impact. And in this episode, Jesse DeYoung, of Flatirons Church, unpacks the transformative steps leaders can take to move from dysfunction to a flourishing, Christ-centered culture. And if you're ready to break free from burnout, build trust, and create a workplace where people and mission thrive, this conversation 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: Hi, 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 to create engaged, flourishing workplaces, where people thrive and organizations make a Kingdom impact. And if you'd like to learn more about me, my book, opportunities to have me speak at an event, this podcast, or recent articles I've written, I invite you to visit allopus—that’s A-L-L-O-P-U-S—dot org. Let’s journey together toward building workplaces where your faith, leadership, and organization flourish.

I’m delighted to welcome Jesse DeYoung to the podcast today. He’s the executive pastor of Flatirons Community Church in Colorado. In our conversation, you'll hear Jesse share about how to identify and break free from unhealthy workplace dynamics that hinder growth and mission impact. Secondly, for practical steps to cultivate a thriving, Christ-centered culture where trust, engagement, and excellence flourish. Also, the essential role of leadership in transforming teams, moving from burnout and dysfunction to energy and purpose. And lastly, how to create a workplace where people feel valued, supported, and inspired to bring their best every day. And if you're ready to lead with greater impact and build a flourishing organization, this episode is for you.

I think you're going to love this interview with Jesse DeYoung. And before we dive in, this podcast is proudly sponsored by the Best Christian Workplaces’ Employee Engagement Survey. Don't wait. This month is a perfect time to gather vital insights from your employees to assess the health of your workplace culture. And as our guest today, Jesse DeYoung, puts it, “You can't fix what you don't see. The Best Christian Workplace Survey gave us the clarity we needed to move from struggling to flourishing. It's an essential tool for any leader serious about building a healthy, Christ-centered organization.” So are you ready to transform your culture? Well, visit workplaces.org to learn more and to start your journey towards 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 episodes like this.

Let me tell you a little bit more about Jesse DeYoung. Jesse's the executive lead pastor at Flatirons Community Church in Colorado. He started at Flatirons in 2012 as a campus pastor and has moved into additional responsibilities and is now an executive pastor, over the past seven years. Flatirons Community Church is a multi-site church that cast a wide net across Colorado in a region where people are more likely to go hiking or skiing than to church on Sunday mornings. Their vision is no matter what, no matter where, Jesus is for you, and we are, too. Flatirons is one of the top 100 churches in America, as noted by Outreach magazine.

So, here’s my conversation with Jesse DeYoung.

Jesse, it’s great to have you on the podcast. I’m looking forward to our conversation today.

Jesse DeYoung: Al, just honored to be on, and love what you're doing at Best Christian Workplace and just your work to make organizations healthy.

Al: Yeah. I appreciate that.

Well, Jesse, let's start off by giving our listeners a snapshot of the ministry at Flatirons Community Church. It's a multi-site church with a wide reach. It's one of the 100 largest churches and maybe even one of the top 10. But what's the vision for Flatirons, and especially as you’re inviting people to meet Jesus and go deeper with God?

Jesse: Our vision—and again, Flatirons is a church, Denver area. We've got five campuses—and our vision is to bring the awesome life of Christ to people in a lost and broken world. And so I would say the thing that—if you come to Flatirons, what you'd realize is we've kind of got this raw, real, gritty, vulnerable sense about how we do ministry, and we're trying to reach people who feel like maybe God gave up on them; Jesus certainly gave up on them; church, they'll never fit there. And so we've just got a passion for those lost and broken people. But at the same time, it's not just enough for them to come to church a couple times. Like, we want them to experience the awesome life of Christ. We want Him to transform their lives, change their lives. And so if you listen to any of the messages from Jim, our lead pastor, or our other teachers, you'll hear there is a lot of Jesus's words; there's a lot of Bible. We do not shy away from what the Bible teaches, but we try to make it relatable and authentic to people who just, they maybe have bad church experiences or a little church experience—we try to make it real for them—but we just want to see them take steps of faith and then invite some friends who may not have much church experience or they've got church baggage of their own.

Al: Yeah. Right.

Well, you’ve been at Flatirons since 2012, and as an executive pastor and that role now for seven years. And Flatirons started working with Best Christian Workplaces in 2019 with an Employee Engagement Survey. And you Surveyed with us each year since 2021. So let's talk about the first few years of your process of assessing the health of your staff and realizing that you needed to make some changes to move forward with a healthy work environment. So what were some of the initial commitments that your leadership team made to kind of start the process toward health?

Jesse: I would say the first Survey that we took actually led to just some really, the reality is that we were getting unhealthy or we were unhealthy. And I remember your team kind of came to us and they said, “Hey, like, here are your scores. Here's what's being said. Here's what's not being said but I think that they're trying to say in this Survey,” and it was really helpful. But what it did lead to, there were other factors, but it led to our board asking Jim, our lead pastor, to take a six-month sabbatical. And so he took some time to work on himself to get healthy.

And while Jim was out, I think that during the time leading up to that—again, you don't just grow unhealthy overnight. An organization doesn't get unhealthy overnight. It's something that it's really digressing into. And I think everyone, Jim, was an easy target, where we would put all point, all blame, all responsibility, all issues up at Jim. And so, like, there were some thoughts on the staff that when Jim was out on his break, “Man, this is going to be easy. The problem is gone, and we’re all fine.” And what we realized, I mean, I think it was, like, a weekend, I was like, “Can we just call Jim, bring him back? Because we’ve all got problems right now. This thing is just broken from top to bottom.” And so Jim came back, came back healthier, but the staff was not at the time. And so we just made a deep commitment to trying to get healthy.

And so I would say a couple of things that stood out to me from that season, number one, the elders of our church, they said, “Hey, in 2020,” which is when Jim came back from his sabbatical, and Jim was back for about, I don't know, six weekends before the world shut down, and we went through all of 2020. So just crazy times. But they said, “Hey, we don't care if we grow at all in 2020. We don't care what giving looks like. The main priority for Flatirons is to get culturally healthy and to get the staff healthy.” And so they prioritized staff health during that season over every other metric that we had as a church, and that laid the groundwork for us to start healing.

I think one of the stand-out characteristics of people who stayed during that season, because the 2020 season, maybe we'll talk about this a little later, but the 2020 season was a time where we lost about half of our staff due to some voluntary severance opportunities, but also people stepping off the team. And the thing that set apart people who stayed from people who left is we saw a lot of people who stayed took ownership of their part, even if it was little. But, like, across the board, there was not finger pointing, “Oh, Jim did this,” or “Jesse did this,” “The leadership team did this.” It was people saying, “Hey, I see how I contributed in even just a small part to our unhealth.”

And then, I think that the other commitment is we just knew it was going to take time. I had a friend, we were talking about just Flatirons, how long we were starting to get unhealthy, and he said, “I think it's at least going to take you—as long as it took you to get unhealthy, it's going to take at least that long to get healthy again.” And so we just realized we got to take this thing slow and not try to rush things and not try to pretend like things are better before they're better.

Al: Yeah. And what great progress you've made, Jesse. I mean, the staff survey shows that progress year after year after year as you came back with that focus.

And, well, over the last few years, Flatirons has clearly become a healthy work environment and actually has moved to flourishing. And Giselle Jenkins, your Best Christian Workplaces consultant, has shared some of the ways that you've blended a highly creative, nontraditional church culture with management best practices, practices that have led to that change to flourishing. So talk about some of the key management practices that you've embraced to move your culture to flourishing.

Jesse: Well, that’s kind of Giselle. I think every time Giselle sits in with us and consults, she's always like, “These are the people who are leading a church that's this big,” you know? We've been so fortunate to have you guys walking alongside of us through this process. And what I'd love to do is take 2020 through 2025 and just kind of some of the steps that we took year over year, not trying to rush the process. And then, maybe we can pull out a couple of the key things, the key practices we have.

But in 2020, we just realized we just needed to get healthy. Like, if we don't do anything else besides just get healthy, we'll get healthy. And so we had some time to do staff reorganization, and we really allowed staff members who no longer believed in the culture, believed in the leadership, or believed in the direction of Flatirons to step off staff. And we just started prioritizing unity, saying, “Things may not be perfect, things may not be the way that we would have them, but at the same time, we're going to be unified together.” And we actually started meeting more as a team where we were meeting as an entire team about, at the time, 80 or so employees. We met once a month. And we started meeting weekly together to pray, to worship, to talk, to communicate, just because we felt togetherness was really key to getting healthy.

And then in 2021, we really went on a mission to define our culture and to improve our culture. So there was just the, like, personal unhealth that needed to get cleaned up in 2020. In 2021 we sat down in a conference room. Man, Al, it would have been on a monthly basis, probably a day, maybe two days a month, talking about what type of a culture do we want? And in my mind, I'm a millennial. You know, I see that Google Workspace is your, like, culture is, like, “Let's get a fun break room, and let's get Bubly water. Let's get the open-office concept.” And so we did all of those things, and I think that they helped.

But what was the most important were cultural values. And this is what I would just drill down on. We defined the seven cultural values of Flatirons, and we started to hire along these. At times we would we would start having corrective conversations around these values. We would champion them. We rewarded staff around them. We would teach them on a regular basis. And one of the ways that I think we were able to turn around our staff is—and Karen Berge—she should probably be on this podcast instead of me—she piloted just all of this work. But what we started doing is we would hire into alignment. And so what we found is that a staff member stepped off who wasn't maybe aligned with us, we were looking for somebody who embodied the core values and the cultural values that we wanted to see. And so when they came on, they were just being themselves, but they were great fits for us. And we started—I'm not saying that everyone we hire is a perfect fit now, but I would say it used to be—I mean, one of the things, Al, if you can imagine, we would tell people back in the day and say, “Don’t buy a house, because we're not sure if you'll make it or not.” And now we've got probably, like, 90, 95% of the people who get hired here, they love working here, and it works out for the medium or the long term. And so we really drill down on cultural values.

In 2022, we got our Survey back, and we had just done all this work on culture, and people are like, “They love the culture. They don't know what the strategy is. And it's unclear.” And I just started thinking of—man, who's the quote? It’s blanking on me—but culture eats strategy for breakfast. I was like, well, whoever said that, you know, like, they must have been eating some of those Colorado brownies or something because that's not what we're experiencing. We’re experiencing, we’ve got great culture, but they’re saying the strategy is unclear. And we realized those things needed to go hand in hand. And so we started implementing EOS, the entrepreneurs operating system.

And really, I think what it did is it allowed people to do great work on a—we're on trimesters, not quarters. Typically, they work on quarters, but for us, trimesters work better. And so people knew whatever we said we were going to do for the next four months is what we're going to do. So they could put great work into it, knowing that things weren't going to change within the next four months, unless it was obvious they needed to. And so we started aligning all the effort of all of our teams into these trimester goals, these yearly goals. And I think it just allowed people to realize the impact that they made on the overall health of the organization and success of the organization.

And they also knew, like, are we winning or not? And before that, you might look at attendance, or you might look at giving. But this showed us like, hey, we're taking these action steps, and people felt like we were winning. And so we got really clear on strategy. Strategy scores went up, and, Al, our leadership scores went down. And this is part of the beauty of the BCWI Survey, for us at least, is we realized when we overemphasized one thing, it can lead us to under emphasize another. And really, what we were under emphasizing, we overemphasized strategy; we under emphasized just leadership and just really the rapport of our leadership team with everybody else. And so we started working on our communication. We knew we had to look in the mirror.

And then, in 2024 we got it back, and our leadership scores had not really improved much either, and that was 2024. I guess that was 2023. Our scores had not improved the way that we would have wanted to see them. And we just realized we needed to take a look in the mirror as leaders and the leadership team and say, “If we're not setting the bar and setting the temperature for our teams in our own spiritual practices in the way that we help people bring Jesus into all the decisions that we make, man, that's going to be, like, that's not good for anybody. We're setting a lid.”

And then, the other thing we realized is in all of the turnaround of culture and strategy and all of the change management, we were doing a lot of that on our own as the leadership team. And really, what they wanted from our team is people to steward the vision and to be listening to where God's taking us and to leave some of the leadership and management to our really capable mid-level managers: our campus pastors, our department heads. And so, Al, we started turning over so much more than we ever thought we'd be able to turn over to this group. We call it strategic alignment team, SAT. And SAT, now, they are working together to solve problems before they bring them up to us. We do a thing called staff thunderdome, where that group debates the positions we'll hire for the next year, and they all have to vote. They advocate for their department, but they vote for the church as a whole. And just watching the unity that comes from that. And they're the ones this year that are actually doing the bulk of the work on our BCWI Survey. So they’re saying, “These are the areas we’re weak. This is where we need to improve, and this is what we feel like we need to do to take steps.”

And so I just think a couple of our management practices, to just double click on them: cultural values were key. Strategic planning process— we use EOS—was key. Empowering the midlevel was just so, so, so—I cannot understate how important it is for an organization our size. And then, we've always got to be working on our communication.

Al: A thrilling story, Jesse. Wow. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. And I’ll say, for our listeners, I've looked at the report, and between ‘23 and ‘24, like, the top 12 out of 15 items that you improved in were all leadership. So congratulations. You know, it really worked. EOS in a church, Jesse.

Jesse: Hey, people look at it, and they say, “Hey, you're bringing business into church.” And I just always, in some ways I understand it. But also, Jesus talked about shepherds more than anything when it came to leaders, and shepherds did not work in churches. Shepherds actually owned sheep or stewarded sheep that were owned and then sold by other people. And so I believe that when Jesus was referring to shepherds, He's actually referring to businessmen and people that worked in the business world. And so we're not afraid to take business best practices to make the church more successful in accomplishing the mission of Jesus.

Al: Well, I've talked to a lot of organizations that are using EOS, including the Best Christian Workplaces, and I'm excited to hear that it's actually working for you. And yeah, just highlighting a couple of these things, you know, the stewarding the vision by delegating to the next level, how that works. Approximately how many staff are in the church now?

Jesse: We’ve got about 110 on staff right now, and that midlevel makes up 16 staff. And we gather together—I started skip leveling and getting together with them weekly just so that we can work on things together. They can understand the way I'm seeing things, but also so that team can coalesce and they can work as a team and not just as delegates from their ministry.

Al: Wow. That’s great. So these values, I mean, so you really focused on that. And I love the way you integrated into the hiring, into the corrective conversations, to rewarding people that reinforce your values. Give us an example of a couple of your values.

Jesse: Yeah. I'll give you our—so we use Pat Lencioni’s framework for values, where you've got permission to play values—kind of like these just go without stating. And then, you've got aspirational. These were ones we learned from our initial Survey. We've got to create some of these. But I'd say the three values that I'm always looking for that we feel like we can't teach when we're hiring someone is one is compete to honor, the next is raw and real, and the third is have fun.

And so if I'm in an interview with someone, I'm looking for, does this person speak honorably about the people in their life, their spouse, their previous coworkers?

When it comes to raw and real, for us, we don't love stories with bows on the end of them. We pray that that's the end of some of our stories. But really, like, a lot of the people who walk into our church, they're going, “My life doesn't have a bow right now. My life right now feels like I'm in the middle of it.” And so we want to know, like, hey, what's something really hard you've had to walk through, and you're still wrestling with God?

And then, the third one is fun. And I always joke with new staff. I’m like, “Man, of all the values to choose, have fun is not productive; it's not efficient,” but it’s just been something that's baked into the lifeblood of our church. When we looked at people who didn't make it on staff or didn't love it on staff, they were too busy to have fun. And so we just try to find little ways to make what we do fun. What we do is super important. We know that. But at the same time, doesn't mean we have to take ourselves too seriously. And so if I'm at a lunch with the interviewee and it feels like the fun is being sucked out of the room, I can look back, and I say, “Well, I know that our team is fun. And so I don't think our team right now is the problem. I think it might actually be a problem here.” And that's one of the things we realized: if you're not fun and you can't have fun, you're not going to love working at Flatirons.

Al: I love it. Great.

Well, Jesse, as we've talked, your church has become a flourishing workplace. What difference does a flourishing culture make in a day-to-day experience for people in your church? You know, your staff, maybe then, even, your congregation?

Jesse: When people enjoy their work, they work harder because they know that it's important, because it's important to them. They spend more time with other people who are on the team just naturally because they enjoy them. And when you've got shared experience and shared time, it builds trust.

And I think it's Covey that said things move at the speed of trust. And so for us, that trust, that's just primarily relational, it allows us to move really, really quickly. And it allows our staff to take risks, not worried about, “What's Jesse going to think, what's Jim going to think about this new thing that we're trying?” When there's trust that’s horizontally and vertically, they know, “Hey, I can try things. And as long as I got good reason for it, I'm not going to be dinged by it. Nothing's going to happen.”

And then, I would just tell you, there is unity between the staff and the lead team. And I think culturally, the unity, there's more division and there's more suspicion in between senior teams and front-line employees and mid-level managers, at least from what I'm reading in HBR and things like that. There's a divide there. And we've really, through your all's coaching, we've worked hard to try to eliminate that gap as much as we can by pushing a lot of authority and responsibility down to the mid-level, where they're doing a lot of the day-to-day leadership and management, so that we can be spiritual leaders, we can be relational. We don't always do it perfectly, but at the same time, it's so much better for me or my colleague’s conversation with a staff person to be pastoral or to be about big vision than it is to be correctional. You know, that should happen from their supervisor. And so we've really been trying to work on that.

And one of my—Al, one of the things I did is I shot some questions about culture and just Best Christian Workplace out to some of the SAT members. And I just said, “Hey, I would love to get your all’s feedback on these questions because sometimes a guy like me can get up here and talk about all the things I think are working or things I'd love to be working on. You guys tell me your experience.” And one of them talked about, “Hey, I feel like I'm highly valued here, and because I'm highly valued,” he said it this way. He said, “It feels like Flatirons wants to be the best place you've ever worked so that you can do the best work you've ever done.” And he says, “I feel like I can do the best work I've ever done because I feel supported, because I feel cared about, because I love the people around me, and because we're seeking unity.” And so from the staff side, I just feel like people are free to do great work.

And then, from the congregational level, it's so interesting. I have a very good friend, and during the time where we got really unhealthy prior to Jim's sabbatical and then afterwards, he listened to a podcast that Jim and I had done, and he was like, “Man, we couldn't see any of that. We just thought things on the weekend were just, they were fine. You guys really faked it really, really well.” And I think that there are people like that. And then there were others that I talked to that they were like, “Yeah, I could sense that something was off. I couldn't put my finger on it. I couldn't tell. But it just felt like something was off.” And so some people could sense it. But I think when you're aligned and when you're healthy, the staff are more confident, from the front-line staff to even to Jim. If Jim feels like he's got the support of the staff, if he feels like the staff are healthy, he's more confident to lead; he's more confident to preach; he's more confident to maybe do something that he—the things that we would have worried about doing three, four years ago, now he feels confidence to go and lead where God’s telling us to lead. And so I think that people sense a unified direction.

And then, I think that during our unhealthy times, I bet, Al, that we spent five hours, maybe 10 hours, a week in sideways conversations, meetings before the meetings, meetings after the meetings, talking about things, whether it's talking about people or things we didn't agree with. There was just so much sideways energy. And not to say that's all eliminated now, but I think it really is lessened to the point where now it feels like we've got momentum-building energy. And it's like you take just 5 to 10 hours a week and you direct that to making progress compared to just sideways energy that doesn't get us anywhere, we're just seeing a lot of innovation. We're seeing our staff dream. And I'm just confident our church is seeing progress and seeing momentum, seeing improvement.

Al: Yeah. And that has a real impact on those you're serving and the congregation. That’s fantastic. Yeah. As you were going through, talking about building trust and how staff take risks, well, that fosters innovation and new work and, yeah, just a reallocation of time to get away from those sideways conversations. All of us know what you're talking about, that's for sure. And I love how that ties into your value of competing to honor, you know, and when you're competing to honor, you're not having a lot of sideways conversations. And you don't need to, because you've done all this other work around building trust and having unity and being together and having fun and all that. So those are great stories. Thanks so much, Jesse.

Well, sometimes in a fast-growing church, it's hard to keep up with growth. And you've had your share of growth over time. So you've opened up new campuses, you're equipping new leaders, fostering excellence in a fast-paced environment. So from where you sit today, what encouragement would you offer to your peers, to other pastors, to other leaders, who may be experiencing the kind of challenges that you faced several years ago?

Jesse: I would tell those leaders, number one, I'm sorry that you're in that position, because I just remember what that felt like. And you got this mission that you care about so deeply. You got these people around you that you love so much, and at the same time, it just feels like things aren't working the way that you want it to. And so I just say, Hey, I am sorry, and I get it.

I would say you can ignore it for a little while, and maybe even for a long while, maybe for a couple of years. And I think that our story, there was a season—I don't know if we ignored it, or we didn't notice it, or we just denied it—but there was a season where we were starting to get unhealthy. Nobody could really name it. Nobody could see it. And yet, eventually, it brought us to a breaking point. And that breaking point, I mean, Al, the people who I care about, who are no longer on staff and really have bad memories from our church and a lot of baggage from our church, that wasn’t deserved at the time, I don't know if I'll ever forget about them. It's been five years, and I have not. I still think about it regularly. And so it just comes at a tremendous cost if you continually allow yourself to get unhealthy.

I would say another caution. So this is not like, “Take BCWI, get healthy. It's going to be great,” you know. The second thing is getting healthy may be the hardest thing that you ever do. I think sometimes we assume that everybody on our team wants to be healthy. And I think if you look around at just the state of people in our country, it's like you look around, and you're like, “Not everybody wants to be healthy,” right? Both in terms of nutrition or working out, exercise, whatever, but then, especially in an organization, there are some people that like the unhealthy Flatirons more than they like the healthy Flatirons. And that tension and those conversations we're just really hard. And it was just a season of incredible loss.

I would say getting healthy was a season of perpetual loss. And we would meet as our leadership team—I think we met in 2019, at the end of the year—and we said, “I think next year’s going to be harder than this year.” And 2020, obviously, was a hard year, but then at the end of 2020, we're like, “I think next year is actually going to be harder than this year.” And I think it was 2022 was the first year that we said, “I don't know if next year’s going to be as hard as this year.” But it was a four-year process of getting healthy. It just took a ton of time.

But the encouragement I would tell people is once you get healthy, you'll never want to go back, and you won't even be able to understand how you worked then. I remember standing in front of our staff team and saying some harder things and some challenging things to our staff. I think it was Jim and I who were up there. And I remember looking out, and these are the things that three years ago I knew were going to result in a dozen different side conversations afterwards, that people would be leaning back, just going like, “Man, this is the wrong decision. We shouldn’t be doing this.” Instead, what we felt as we stood up there is we felt the staff saying, like, “Hey, we're not sure where we're going, but we trust you, we're with you, and we're going to do this together.” And so, man, a healthy culture, we can move so fast, we can run really hard, and we can enjoy what we're doing. So you never want to go back.

And then, Al, I give you guys a plug. I mean, use help trying to figure out how you can improve getting healthy. I would tell anybody who's in a spot where they're like, “Man, I might be unhealthy,” Best Christian Workplace gives us a checkup every single year. And I think it is a world-class, first-to-class resource when it comes to just evaluating.

And then, bring in other people to evaluate your organization, to just see some things that you can't see. When we've done that, it's helped us take—I mean, it's sped things up by six months, by 12 months, just by getting outside eyes on what's happening at our church that we couldn't see on our own.

Al: Well, Jesse, I hear over and over, yeah, I mean, people think that you can change a culture in a short period of time. And your advice and your experience is really helpful because it doesn't happen overnight, and it takes time. Sometimes three to five years is often a response that I'll give to a question, well, how long does this take? And sometimes it takes even longer. But you've really expressed that . And as you say—I've heard this over and over again—once you're healthy, once you get to flourishing, you don't want to go back. You're going to do everything you can to maintain that really healthy culture. So, great stories, and thanks for sharing. Yeah. A lot of people have been in that spot, and to see the transition, the transformation is just great.

Well, Jesse, the calling of a pastor, I believe, is to shepherd the flock that God's entrusted to them. And, you know, it can be challenging to keep being filled by God so that you actually have something to give. And so how do you and your leadership team at Flatirons stay fresh with God and your relationship with God and the work that you're doing? Can you share some specific practices and habits that keep you on track as far as the spiritual formation of your leadership and the character as a team?

Jesse: Is it Collins that writes about you've got to acknowledge what reality is? You have to define reality as reality. And for us, we had to realize, like, when you don't work at a church, you come to church on the weekends, and that fills you up. And then, you start, maybe it takes you three months, six months, after working on a church, you experience what we call the dip, which is, “Church doesn't fill me up anymore. It's actually taking away from my, you know, my worship. It's harder to worship when I come to church.” And so we've tried to just encourage each other to say, “Hey, we might not be able to take off our, like, knowing how everything works in the program and are evaluating plans. But at the same time, we've got to look at the impact that Flatirons is having in people's lives and actually do some of the pastoral work.” And I think they say that shepherds need to smell like sheep. And really, that's one of the ways that we stay fresh is by just hearing the impact that God's having in people in our church’s lives. And I think that sometimes what I've seen is pastors in really large churches, it becomes more about the behind-the-scenes work or the green rooms or the message prep and not being with people. And that's something that I think Jim just does a really good job modeling for our team. We've got to be with people. We've got to be with the sheep. And when we hear the stories of how God's changing their lives, I think that energizes us, revitalizes us.

We realize, and Al, I tell you, we have not done this well over the last year. And so back in the fall, we did a staff retreat. Sometimes we'll go through strategy or we'll work on different things, and we just had a sense like it seems like we're pretty dry spiritually. We're not praying like we'd like to. We're not listening to God like we want to. And so we spent a retreat where the entire thing—we brought in a spiritual director, who just gave us things to do. And one of the options was we wrote a song of lament. And he said, “If you're walking through loss, write a song of lament.” Some people, he gave a prompting for how to take a walk with Jesus through nature and what to observe. And then, following that, about once a month during our staff meetings, we’ll take a good two hours—and so we extend the time—and give our staff a practice to work on and just time to spend with Jesus so that we can refill.

We also, we're big believers in sabbaticals. I know that there are people who say, “Hey, sabbaticals aren't going to heal your burnout. Sabbaticals are not the key to you feeling better about what you do.” And I agree with all of that. The same time, sabbaticals are an opportunity to learn what you can't learn while you're doing because you're not doing the things you normally do. And so it really is us taking a break from what we do for God to speak to us in a fresh way. And I received a sabbatical a year and a half ago, and God just, He showed me some things about my identity, and He spoke into me things that He would not have been able to speak into me as someone who was able to work for my value at the church every week and be around on a weekend and have people say, “Hey, I love Flatirons. I love that message,” whatever. I was getting those little hits of identity on the weekend, and it took stripping that away for me to realize my soul and my sense of worth, my sense of worth toward God, from God, has deteriorated, and I'm just filling it up with achievement. I'm just filling it up with affirmation. And so a sabbatical is something everyone on our staff, from the lead pastor all the way down through the facilities team, receives a sabbatical. We just believe it's so important.

And then, for me, one thing that I've been doing for years and years is the five-year journal. I wish I was better at journaling. I wish I could, like, just journal, and I'm working on it. But at the same time, the five-year journal, I think I have to write five lines a day. And so when I'm reading my Bible and praying, I just write five lines a day of what's happening, what I'm thinking about, and just the perspective that you can get when you're reading two, three, four years of data, just going like, “I don’t even remember the thing I was worried about. I don’t remember the thing I was frustrated about.” Or like, “Hey, Jess, when you get in one of these busy seasons around Easter or Christmas, you start to get more irritated, and that's something that you should actually pay attention to and work on.” So that's been one that's been just really helpful for me in my role.

Al: I do an online journal, or it’s an app on my iPad. And it's interesting to—it has a button. Well, on this day, what were your previous entries in previous years? Now, I've used the same journal now for about nine years, and it's so fascinating to go back. So on this day six years ago, this is what I was doing. And it's just a fascinating experience. Yeah. But love what you’re saying there, Jesse. Yeah.

So, you know, it’s great to celebrate the journey that you've been on at Flatirons over the past few years, and now that you've got a flourishing culture, it certainly is something to celebrate. However, workplace health isn't—it's not a destination. It's an ongoing commitment to engaging and equipping employees. So as you and your leadership team reviewed your last Employee Engagement Survey, where do you go from here? What do you do to keep going? And what changes do you see coming ahead?

Jesse: Here's something interesting, Al. Our leadership team is actually not spending a ton of time on this current Survey. Instead, we've read it in—we always joke that we need a good extended time with Jesus before we read some of those open-ended comments.

Al: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Jesse: And you know, you just, you got to be prepped and have your shield up. And I think our people are really generous with their comments and they’re kind. But we realized the next level down, our mid-level team, strategic alignment team, SAT, they are so strong as a team, as individual leaders, their level of ownership, care for the mission. But also, just, I genuinely feel like we could take any problem that the church is facing, put it in front of that team, and because of the people who are on that team, they're going to figure it out. And in some senses, they're figuring it out better than our leadership team. And so SAT is working on our Survey. They're working on the follow up. They know that there are some departments that have some improvements to make.

One of the things that we realized is people both appreciated the work-life balance that Flatirons offers and then also said that they're struggling with work-life balance. And so we don't know if there are some systems that need to change, if we've got to do some different training. As always, a church our size has got to figure out communication, and so the team's working on that.

But I would say, this year I'm just really proud of that team and the work that's happening because they're taking full ownership of it, and they all get their individualized roll-up reports. And I mean, every team knows how they score compared to other teams. Every team knows like, “Hey, this is the good, the bad, and the ugly from our reports compared to the rest of the church.” And I don't want to say it's unhealthy competition, but it feels like maybe a national swim team, where it's like everybody wants to do their best because they know that if they do their best, then we win the relay. And so it really does feel like right now the right people are working on these things. And I'm excited to see some of the proposals they bring for things that we need to focus on this next year.

Al: Yeah. Fantastic. Wow.

Well, Jesse, this has just been a great conversation. And you know, I just go back to the beginning, you know, the steps that you took towards health, from your priorities starting in 2020 and some of the hard work that you put in and to see over time, the kind of step by step, from getting healthy to declaring and improving your culture to really defining what your cultural values are and how you've integrated those and how you, then, worked on strategy and brought in a whole new process, the entrepreneur operating system. And I know that's had a tremendous impact on, you know, I look at your top 10 scores, and you've got a couple of strategy questions right there in the top 10. People know that you're meeting your goals. And then, your own leadership, spiritual practices. And I just really encourage other leaders working with a group your size, that SAT, strategic alignment team, the 16 mid-level staff and their role really in creating the culture and embracing the values that you've all worked on. And yeah, so, thanks for your advice. Thanks for sharing your story. Thanks for giving us good spiritual foundation habits for any ministry to consider at the top. This is just been a great conversation.

How about one more thing that you'd like to add that we've talked about, you know, bottom line?

Jesse: Bottom line, your team will only be as healthy as your leaders and as yourself. So you have got to prioritize your own spiritual health, your own emotional health, your own physical health. And then, really, I cannot overstate just the team that works with you, if you're a leader, an executive pastor, if you're an executive team member, the team that works with you is of utmost importance to you guys doing great work. And I think so often we underinvest in those team members, and I just would encourage, do the work, invest in those team members, and you’ll see fruit with the rest of your team, you'll see fruit in your church, and you'll actually enjoy your work more, too.

Al: Jess, I want to thank you for your contribution today. And most of all, I really appreciate your commitment and the hard work that you've taken to lead your church and represent the local church that invites people to meet Jesus and His transforming love. So thanks for taking your time out today and speaking in the lives of so many listeners.

Jesse: Man, Al, it was a pleasure. And again, so grateful for you guys, and look forward to this next year’s Survey. Keep doing the great work of the Kingdom.

Al: Appreciate it. Thank you.

Thanks so much for listening to my conversation with Jesse DeYoung. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

You can always find ways to connect with him 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 any questions on flourishing workplace cultures, please email me, al@workplaces.org.

You know, flourishing workplaces just don't happen by accident. They're built through intentional leadership, trust, and a commitment to growth. And as you reflect on today's conversation, ask yourself, what is one step that you can take this week to move your team from perhaps unhealthy to flourishing? Whether it's seeking honest feedback, investing in your people, or leading with greater authenticity, don't wait. Start today and be a leader who cultivates a flourishing, Christ-centered culture.

And are you keeping up with the latest trends in ministry compensation? Well, next week we welcome Susan Griffith Byers, the founder of the Church Compensation Services, to unpack the newest insights on fair and effective compensation structures in Christian organizations. From salary trends to benefits that attract and retain top talent, Susan shares what every ministry leader needs to know. So don't miss this essential conversation.

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.