Transcript: Data-Driven Leadership: How Facing the Truth About Culture Builds Trust and Strengthens Your Church // Brad Cooper, NewSpring Church

Brad: Data-driven decisions, what you’re talking about, it helps remove the emotion, and I think sometimes in the world of testimony, which are powerful, right, and in the world of anecdote, which are also powerful, we’ve got to be honest and get into a place of objective, data-driven decisions, and you cannot make data-driven decisions if you’re unwilling to face the actual data.

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

Robert: Welcome back to the Called to Flourish Podcast, where leaders and cultures grow. Excited to have Brad Cooper with us today. Brad is the Lead Pastor of Culture and Direction at New Spring Church. New Spring Church is a multi-site church campus in South Carolina. Brad’s role there is to help shape staff, culture, leadership development, organizational clarity, all of the incredible things that go into building and developing a healthy church team and culture. Welcome to the podcast, Brad. It sounds like you’ve got some friends in the background as well.

Brad: Yeah. Apparently so. Good to say hello, everybody. If we want to reshoot that, we could, but I could also introduce you to Sugar. She is our family dog, and she’s excited that we have some delivery folks coming into the house right now.

Robert: A couple things: I love the name, and it’s always exciting to get a delivery to the house. Anyway, welcome to the podcast, Brad. Thank you for your time. I just want to let our audience know, New Spring Church has been a friend and partner of Best Christian Workplaces for many years, all the way back starting in 2015, I believe, Brad is when you guys started.

Brad: Yeah. Over a decade.

Robert: Yes. Over a decade. You guys are well versed in this process of discovery and measuring workplace health and culture, and you did receive the Certified Best Christian Workplace designation in 2017, so just a couple years after you started that journey. Then most recently – congratulations on this – in March 2025 you guys became what we call Flourishing, a Flourishing Certified Christian Workplace Culture. What Flourishing means, just for our audience who may not know, we measure culture on a five-point Likert scale. A 4.0 or higher is considered healthy. That is that employee-validated healthy threshold, it is 4.0 or higher. But the 4.25 and higher is what we consider flourishing, which is just the top. It’s a remarkable, healthy, flourishing culture. Congratulations on achieving those scores. I think if there is one thing that we know about you and your team and your church is that you have intentionally - obviously a decade of this - but you’ve intentionally prioritized staff culture and not just as a mere metric or numbers, but understanding the heart, the shepherding, the stewardship behind what the numbers and metrics mean. I’d love to talk a little bit about that and maybe get your insights on, when was the moment? What was the shift that happened where prioritizing this process of workplace culture and health became a nonnegotiable, I guess, is the best way to say it, for your church?

Brad: Yeah. Well, I’m honored to be here. I’m here as the mouthpiece and representative of hundreds of staff members and so I recognize that full well. My colleagues and teammates are amazing. I work in an amazing place. You guys have been so helpful for us in holding up a mirror and really knowing ourselves. That’s been something, like I mentioned earlier, we’ve been able to journey with ya’ll for over a decade. Every year we come into this process and we have a culture of improvement that is just kind of inert and innate, and we walk about improvement. This is kind of one of our big moments to identify how we might be able to get better. I will just be candid. We had a really difficult moment in 2016 as a staff. We lost our founding pastor to a moral failure. In that moment, we had just actually begin this journey with you guys. We leaned in heavy as a staff. Myself, along with some of our other elders, felt that it was such a key measure to understand culture, it caused us to look into the mirror to face ourselves and we started to really evaluate our internal shepherding culture. Culture, it’s a part of my job title, but it has a lot of definitions out there. Internally, we speak about culture as simply all the accumulation of everything we say, do, allow, and celebrate. We really try to keep that. What are the things we say, do, allow, and celebrate wholistically? At every campus, we have several, internally in our central support and really began to measure and see where the places were we had opportunities for improvement, and be honest about it. We didn’t want to sweep anything under the rug. Again, we were cut to the core, so to speak, and it was – this is Best Christian Workplace, so you guys understand as believers leaning in, we wanted to really get all the way into the very bottom of the barrel internally and make sure that we had evaluated all the spaces where the enemy might want to wreak havoc in our lives, in our culture, and let’s be honest about that. One of the great things about being a Christian is the grace that we have in our Lord to repent, to change our mind, and to begin to shift directions and pivot and do something different. We’re just taking advantage of that. It’s not been an aspiration toward perfection, but rather an aspiration towards progress over the last decade. That’s a little bit of the backstory that kind of goes into this moment annually for us as we are evaluating ourselves wholistically.

Robert: Yes. Well, that’s - first of all, thank you for your honesty in sharing that story. It sounds like the Lord was really aligning the timing of things to have this tool and this resource at Best Christian Workplaces to assist you guys, kind of, through that challenging time. It’s just exciting to see so much life and growth and health and even flourishing since, what sounds like, a pretty difficult time for your community. You know, sometimes I wonder if pastors often try to – or just kind of want to – avoid those extra meetings or avoid that sort of corporate kind of project that sometimes sort of feels like an HR thing, you know, measuring culture, you know, those kinds of things, but I’d to just hear your thoughts on this. It seems to me that as you prioritize this work, culture – and I love your definition of it, by the way, which is really the full wholistic environment that’s created at your workplace, at your church. When you do grow in health and alignment in these things that we’re talking about, it actually saves time for pastors, right. It’s less confusion, less relitigating conversations and decisions that were made, maybe patching up relational strains. It creates more time for preaching, discipleship, focusing on the people and community presence. Would you say that’s true, that when you grow healthier, you can actually focus more on the mission and less on some of the problems that come along with a less healthy culture, is that a fair assessment?

Brad: I think so. I think, you know, you are really talking about the air we breathe, all the layers of culture. I think one of the things that happens inside of organizational structures is you have bullets and job descriptions. Culture, as you alluded, can just land in the Human Resource Department, and that’s like a slice of their span of care, but I think what you really see on great teams and you see in great cultures, places that you love to work, or teams you’d love to be a part of, even in your volunteering space or in sport, it’s everybody owns the culture together. I think that kind of language, it’s pervasive, and that makes it exciting for folks to want to be a part and want to make sure they’re adding value. It also allows for everybody to be a part of the solution, and that way, even if it’s something that’s off or there is something that’s identified that you want to work on, it doesn’t feel like it’s over there and I don’t have any ability in my own space or span of care or in my own department to fix that. No, no, no. We are culture and we are creating it. Again, I think a lot of this, it goes right with being a good follower of the Lord. I mean, the idea of being a faithful farmer, it’s one of the things that kind of gets lifted by Paul to Timothy in the pastoral epistle. You know, we can control certain elements. We put the right seed in the ground. We do the right work in the right season. And then the Lord takes care of the growth. He takes care of the fruit. Honestly, I feel like that’s a large part of what we try to do, is not to get overwhelmed by the distance we want to travel, or the overwhelm by how much there are things to work on, but rather, let’s just take care of the right here, in front of us, control the controllables, begin to create some milestones in front of us, and then let’s just begin to work and trust the process and be a faithful farmer with what’s in our stewardship. And so, honestly, that’s what we’ve just tried to do and the Lord has been just grateful to give us the fruit, you know, as we’ve just been faithful in our farming.

Robert: I love that. You’re mentioning shepherding, farming, stewardship, kind of that pastor’s heart behind it. The way I like to look at it is because we’re talking about like metrics and data and we’ve got numbers, you know, but what better friend could you have, outside of course, the Holy Spirit partnering with you, than actionable data or real clear insight, because sometimes I think as leaders we feel symptoms, like you might feel a symptom in your body, right, you might feel fatigued. But the question is, what’s the root cause of that symptom? What’s the source of that? And once you identify what the problem is, then you have the tools and at least the direction to make improvements. I think that’s – whereas I always like to emphasize with that shepherding, pastor’s heart, is sometimes like, well, data, we don’t need data, but actually data, it’s just like going to the doctor, you know, what are my blood results here? What’s actually happening with the health profile with my body? It’s very similar in an organization where you get that data, you get those metrics, and all of a sudden, you’ve got a much clearer picture of what’s going on there, and it makes the shepherding work, that farming work that you’re mentioning, so much more effective, I think. You also mentioned...

Brad: Grab a hold of that. I’ll grab a hold of that. You’re exactly right. I didn’t grow up with the grandeur of trying to be a pastor. I’m a child of a business leader. “My seminary,” if you will, was in the home of a contractor. But data-driven decisions, what you’re talking about, it helps remove the emotion.

Robert: Yes.

Brad: And I think sometimes in the world of testimony, which are powerful, right, and in the world of anecdote, which are also powerful, we’ve got to be honest and get into a place of objective, data-driven decisions, and you cannot make data-driven decisions if you’re unwilling to face the actual data. In our world, we’re a matrix organization with multiple campuses, multiple departments or divisions, and what the data is allowing us to see is it allows us to see trends and outliers. We can see that there may be a trend that is positive in a lot of spaces, but in this specific area, we’ve got an outlier that’s going the wrong direction, or the inverse, we’re trending in a negative way this way. But here’s a couple of outliers in this department or in this campus, and that tells us that there is something good going on there we want to get into. Just again, it makes us be able to focus our energy and our resources and prioritization faster so we make decisions – we stop making mistakes longer and we start making better decisions faster. But you lean into the data, and it gets the emotion out of it. I’m an emotional person. I’m an emotional leader. I’m an emotional preacher. I think that’s a gift from the Lord to be someone who’s emotive or someone that leans into affection, but the reality is when you are making these kind of decisions, the data helps you with confidence to know I’m not seeing this through a biased lens of emotion or feeling or a story or an anecdote. This is a really good decision we can lean in and we can bank on. I just – back to your point, I think pastors, leaders, lean into data. It’s helpful. Don’t be scared of it. But that takes a level of facing yourself, and I mean still, 11 years in, every time we come around to this, I have to like brace against all my personal insecurity because all I want to do is be the very best. I want our team to be the very best. These things are good at saying, here are places where you can improve, here are places where you need to focus and spend attention, and being able to hear that and being able to step into that is really what discipleship is. This is discipleship because discipleship really starts at the edge of where comfort ends and pain begins. I just want to say that out loud. My discipleship journey as a person, it happens when I get to the edge of my comfort and I’m stepping into faith or I’m stepping into something that stretches me. And so many times I can tell you, in the decades of conversations of our elders and our core leaders, the results of this survey help us step into collective discipleship to the spaces where we need sanctification internally. And again, that’s what – we want to put the bride of Christ on display and see it glorified and beautified, and that’s going, again, happen over progression. That’s another large part of this. It’s a really great 360-degree view of discipleship opportunities in the collective that is our church staff.

Robert: Yes. Amen. And you were mentioning the pain, right, the pain of hearing honest feedback and having that mirror. But, I just want to challenge leaders, especially pastors, or any leader really, the pain of avoiding the initial pain can be an even greater pain, right, because culture can boil down to, not just the effectiveness of a church, or any culture – err – organization, but also its ability to even survive, right. It can become a survival thing, not just an effectiveness thing. Sometimes, you know, we might want to avoid looking at the blood labs because of the pain of facing what it might say, but denying that access can result in something even more painful. But I will say, you also see the strengths of your culture as well through these. It’s not all bad. There are things to celebrate, always things to celebrate along the way in your data, in your metrics. There are always things to look at to see, this is where we’re strong, this is where we have momentum. Just a word of encouragement to leaders out there, you know courage and curiosity, I think is the big thing of, hey, I want to see what the data really says so that we can be honest about this, implement things, celebrate the wins, celebrate the strengths, know where we’re having some momentum, and then pick up the pieces in some other areas and make some improvements. Part of your story, it sounds like you shifted to, kind of, a team-based leadership model. I’m curious about that. You mentioned, kind of, ownership of the culture, which I love that concept where everyone owns the culture. But tell me about that shift. What happened with the pivoting to that kind of team-based leadership model and how, maybe, what were some challenges or what has that resulted in, in terms of your growth?

Brad: Yeah. Well, thanks for asking. You know, let me just say this, the pastor in me wants to tie it back to doctrine, bang, right away, and we’re trinitarian, so that means we believe in one God who is many. There is a beauty in the unity and diversity of the Godhead that we were created in the image of. I like to say it this way: The very best team in the universe is our God and when He created humanity, He created us in team, and so we have an opportunity as teams, wherever they are, as a husband and wife team, or as a ministry team, or as teams in our organizations or on the sports complex fields, the very best teams operate as one, but yet they’re still distinct in their roles. The New Testament calls these elders. Again, we were planted in a single-eldership model, which honestly, reading back in church history, is a pretty modern move in church history. It’s a very American, very Westernized move. Nothing wrong with it, but in our moment of crisis, we recognized that an eldership ballasted the team model, ballasted a multi-site church, and so we leaned into that and we found – again, that was in 2016 and so we’re a decade in now – we leaned into teaching in team, leading in teams, so we are a team of teams. This has been, I think, in this generational moment, something that the next generation, Gen Z and the Millennials above them, are unbelievable collaborative. They reject in many ways “the sage on the stage” and lean into “we are a part of the body and we all have a role to play.” It’s not a flattening, per se, of the church, but rather an affirmation of the gifts and all of the different kinds of ways that the Spirit uses the people of God to be collaborative to be a team. That’s the way we talk about it. That’s the way we invite our folks to become members of our church and join our team. It also creates confidence in things like any kind of succession plan or generational change because you’re not leaned up on any one leader. You’re leaned up on a team and so the core of the team will be there, as we have had members of our team sit, step into retirement, or step into new seasons, and new team members step into the eldership role. It’s just created competence and a little bit more strength of stability for our church since the transition in 2016. That’s a little bit of the background on team. I don’t know if there is any one part you want to pull at or you want me to speak more on, but that’s just kind of the . . .

Robert: It’s the second time today I’ve chatted with somebody about the idea of team and how a team is kind of intrinsic to the nature of God’s – His nature as a pluralistic God. One God, let us make man in Our image, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God, in a sense, when you look at it that way, is sort of a team, right, and so He created us for community and He created us to function on teams, not always to be a Lone Ranger. I think it’s probably fair to say that you’re growth, because you guys have experienced pretty good growth over the last decade in terms of expansion, multi-sites, things of that nature, is that accurate?

Brad: Yeah. Since 2020 we’ve – you know COVID was a leveler for everybody basically, but since 2020 we have experienced growth. Our church had some financial debt back in 2017. We actually had $46 million of financial debt and a whole lot of buildings that we had leveraged debt to build, and so actually, at this moment, since 2023, have zero debt and we have stability and we have permanent locations in every single one of our campuses, except for one, which is the one we’re working on right now. Again, this stability happens in team. I want to just commend it while we got a chance to say this because I feel like I sleep better at night as a pastor. My burnout, and the burnout of my brothers and sisters around me, it levels down, and you don’t carry the weight all by yourself. If you do a little bit of research on the history of the single-elder model in America, you’ll find that it’s a post World War 2 reality when after the War the number one and number two most leaned into people in our communities in America were military veterans and business entrepreneurs. When you take military veteran and triangle hierarchical leadership and business entrepreneur, you get our modern Christian model of staff culture, and I think a lot of that kind of a model is not lent into the plurality of us, and so what you see is a lot of people either rising rocket ship – nothing wrong with that, but it’s hard to maintain and so the weight and the heaviness of living in that space, ultimately we weren’t designed to carry it and so you see a lot of crumpling and breaking down of ministry leaders, either quietly just going away and retiring and throwing off the calling, or burning out and blowing up and then that becomes very public. I speak like this, candidly, with other leaders that I love. I don’t think that there’s anything that requires this in Scripture, but I do think these are principles and axioms we see in Scripture that we can lean back into and conserve and bring into our modern moment and leverage the team model.

Robert: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Well, that is very well stated. Another thing – err – a few things, I should say, that seem to be rising up and strengths of yours, that you guys have seen in your scores increase and increase, kind of bolster around is trust in leadership, which this team model seems to be playing into that very nicely, unity among staff, resilience through growth. Are these some of the fruits that you’re seeing as you’ve grown in a healthier workplace culture and church staff? Tell me, talk to me a little bit about some of these things you’ve been experiencing in a positive way.

Brad: You know, I’m hearing – I’m on a podcast with you today, but the reality is we celebrate, but we don’t talk about a lot of – and this is kind of one of those, you know, little tensions. We celebrate individuals, we celebrate people doing great leadership, but we don’t pat ourselves on the back a whole lot. I’m just being honest. We just try to remain faithful with what’s going on today and what’s going on this season and celebrate this over that for a moment, but yeah, we try to be as transparent and accessible as we can be in every level of leadership. We have a meeting, and actually your BCW reports are actually something that started this when it came to our strategic initiative, we started having – we’re in 13 cities across the state of South Carolina and we started having a 9 am Monday morning standing meeting because of some of the results we had several years ago, and our elders lead that meeting every Monday morning for 15 minutes and it’s just creating this servant-hearted reminder. We lean into 2 Timothy 2:2, which Paul writes to Timothy, his very last letter, by the way, and he says, “Find faithful men and women, raise them up, and cascade this leadership into them.” We talk like this in front of our staff and say, this is intended to hit you and move through you, and here’s what we are as leaders, here’s where we’re going. We look at our Great Commission metrics every single Monday morning. Our Great Commission metrics tie right in, of course, to Matthew 28. It’s things like attendance, baptism, engagement in our church, and leaders in our church, who our membership is, and we just try to constantly keep that in front of our staff. Any problem we have, no spin ever. We try to honestly hurt ourselves with transparency as often as we can, believing that that’s what the Lord is going to do in healing and in correcting and let our staff collaborate a lot to help us come up with solutions that we move forward with when we are planning our strategic initiatives as a church, etc., etc. We start talking like this in front of our entire church as well and creating moments where we have elder updates quarterly that kind of go with the quarters of the business year, if you like, Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4. We’re talking like this in front of them in an email very regularly, again, just making ourselves available. All of this was insights we learned from Best Christian Workplace and then we began to implement and take in the steps of just leadership consistency, doing it over time, and you said it earlier, choosing the pain of discipline now rather than the pain of disappointment later, and that’s been key, I think, for us to create that trust that goes back and forth between shepherds, staff, all of our parishioners, and the laypeople in our church, etc.

Robert: Amen. That’s how it’s done. Consistency. Communication. Transparency. Honesty. It has resulted in these incredible outcomes for you and your church and your staff and your culture and your community, and of course, ultimately what we’re after, kingdom impact, the body of Christ, more disciples, the work being done effectively. We at BCW are extremely excited for all of you and for all of the work that you guys are doing in your area as you expand and grow and grow and grow. We just love these stories. We love seeing this play out in real life. You guys are the ones who are carrying the mantle, doing the work, and implementing all of these strategies and making it work for you. I want to just commend you, your team, your church, everyone involved in the incredible outcomes and results that you guys have experienced. It’s very, very encouraging to all of us at Best Christian Workplaces as we hear these stories and see these outcomes.

Brad: What you guys are doing is loving people, and maybe you don’t think of it like this, or maybe you do, but when you love someone enough to hold the mirror up and tell them the truth in love, it gives them the opportunity to move towards a more glorified resonance, echo, reflection of the Lord, and so we love you guys. I talk about you guys to other church leaders all the time. Currently I’m on a board with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. I know they lean into you guys as well. I talk about how we have leaned in and found so much value. Thank you guys for what you do, your care, your concern. It is massively helpful. I know you guys are in the data, down into the grind, all the time, but from one church in South Carolina that needed to improve, and now 11 years later, we’ve gotten to this mark of flourishing, we have celebrated that internally, and we’re hoping to strive for improvement next year as well. Thank you guys for allowing the great feedback and the tools, the resources, ya’ll provide.

Robert: Our great pleasure. Thank you so much. Do you mind if I end with a couple rapid-fire questions for you just so we can get to know you a little bit more? Make it quick. Okay. So, preaching prep or leadership strategy, what’s your preference?

Brad: Oh my gosh, it depends on the day. I love leadership, and actually, I think that we could do more through the leadership of the whole of the church than any one sermon, so I would probably go into the leadership over the preaching, if I had to pick.

Robert: Leadership over preaching, I like that. Okay. I think we know the answer based on your background, but hunting in the woods or time on the lake? You never know the answer, but hunting in the woods or time on the lake?

Brad: Well, here’s what I’m actually going to tell you. I’m going to take time on the lake because that’s family friendly. I’m a dad of four. Hunting is amazing. I enjoy being an outdoorsman. Typically, that’s me and the Lord and nature, but I love the lake with my family.

Robert: How about both? Let’s go to the lake and then do a little hunting at the same time? Yeah? Amen.

Brad: Sounds great.

Robert: Okay. That works for us. Alright. Well, hey, well, thank you, Brad. I appreciate your time. We’ll have you back on the podcast sometime in the future. Thank you to, again, all of you and the work you’re doing. I just want to say to our audience, please subscribe to the podcast. If you know anybody you think would be encouraged by what we shared today, Brad’s story, his church’s story, anything that we talked about, please share this with a colleague, a friend, a pastor, anybody, a leader who you think would benefit from this, and do tune in next time for more incredible conversations with leaders like Brad and others as well. God bless you. We’ll see you next time.