All right, here we go. I'll count us in and welcome you to the show in three, two, Well, AJ, I'm really excited to have you on the Revitalize My Church podcast. Thanks for joining me today. Man, it's my pleasure to be here. You know, I reached out to you a little while ago, asked you to be on the show. Honest truth is you are the co-host of a podcast that would be my podcast if you hadn't started your podcast before I started my podcast. We got the name too. You got the name, you got the name, the church revitalization podcast. But you are more than just a podcaster. You are a leader, a coach of an organization in ministry that I have learned a ton from over the course of the last six or seven years. And I'm excited to share a bit about what you've learned about church revitalization, church replanting. Before we get into sort of the guts of our conversation, why don't you share a little bit about your background, how you ended up in ministry and doing what you're doing today? Yeah, well, man. Super blessed and all credit and glory to God because I'm just some nobody guy that put myself out there and willing to be used. So I was just a lay leader in my church. Fortunately, I was involved in a church that was very... very intentional about investing in building people up to lead in ministry and to find your gifts and your passion. And so just as a part of that experience, I ended up intersecting with the former CEO of the Malfers Group. His name is Ron Dineny. He's a great friend. And his brother-in-law was Aubrey Malfers, the late Dr. Aubrey Malfers. And so, you know, they always say it's who you know. Right. And I just accidentally ended up getting to know somebody that that really changed the trajectory of my life because, you know, I was I was in a period of waiting. You know, I had been, you know, kind of in some ministry that that I know confidently God had called me into, but was also then in a waiting period. And God had, you know, I really heard clearly that the work that I had been doing was in preparation for something new. And just right on time, God came through and I intersected with the Malfers group and Dr. Malfers. And that was back in twenty fourteen. I just celebrated ten years in ministry. But I didn't know what a church revitalization was before that. I just knew God was preparing me to work with pastors. I didn't know what that would look like. And man, what a fun ride and blessing it's been. And it's taken me all over the world now. helping build leaders in the church and help churches be successful at making and maturing disciples of Jesus. Really cool. I mean, it's a really cool story. I really appreciate the fact that you kind of really came from the marketplace into ministry. So you had some business and you mentioned before we started recording some experience in local politics and other things, which I'm sure prepared you for a lot of stuff in the local church. You'd be amazed how much crossover there is. I'm not surprised at all. You've mentioned the Malfers Group a few times here and the late Dr. Aubrey Malfers. For our audience that might not be familiar with Malfers Group and its origins, why don't you give us a little bit of background on the Malfers Group and what you do to serve churches? Yeah, sure. Well, Dr. Malfers was a professor at Dallas Theological Seminary for right about thirty five years. And throughout his time there, he authored around twenty six books, mostly from the early nineties up until just a couple of years before he passed in twenty twenty two. And, you know, he was just hyper focused on building leaders in the church. And on building healthy churches. So church revitalization, church health was just a real strong focus of his. And he was a real champion at Dallas Seminary and across seminaries because his his books are used as curriculum all over the world of education. of getting people prepared, not only to lead from a, you know, from a pastoral standpoint, but from a leadership standpoint. It's such a, you know, there's so much that pastors coming out of seminary don't know about leading an organization well and a healthy biblical life. way. And Dr. Malfers just saw that gap and really spent his life trying to fill it. And so we're just continuing on that legacy for sure. And so we revitalize churches. We do two primary things. That's health and revitalization through a process we call strategic envisioning. And then we do leadership pipeline design and pipeline development in churches to make sure they've always got people filling a pipeline to participate in the work of the ministry. We believe it's not supposed to be outsourced to those getting paid to do it, but we're all supposed to participate in the work of the ministry. And so many churches struggle with that to get volunteers engaged and to do the quantity and quality of work they want to do. And we come alongside them to help them do that as well. You and I, we live pretty much daily in the space of connecting with churches that are trying to find new footing, a new way forward, maybe stuck, maybe decline, maybe near death. I was reading an article yesterday that somebody shared on the platform now called XY. formerly Twitter. And it was a document, a report that somebody had recently written about church planting and the need for church planting in North America and why it's so important that we are planting new churches. They talked a little bit in the article about revitalization and replanting, but the focus was church planting. And you've probably been in these circles a little bit. I've been in the church planting circles a little bit. I'm a church planter myself. And Church planting and church revitalization, I think, are both necessary for the expansion of God's kingdom in North America and around the world. But can you talk specifically to why you think it's so important that we are placing an emphasis on revitalization? Why is it important for us to preserve and to help churches that are in decline find a new way forward? Yeah, this is such a great conversation. And I think too often in our space, Bart, people feel like if you're in revitalization, you're against planting or vice versa. And I don't know why anybody would think that, because I think there's great value in both. And so, you know, we do sometimes, probably not often enough, maybe on our podcast or something, you know, reiterate, we're not against church planting. We want to see that happen. It's just not our space, not what we work in. But yeah, But, you know, revitalizing a church, I mean, let's first just look at a practical standpoint of it. Most of the time they own property, they own a building. They've got like this, you know, from an expense standpoint, they've got a lot of the heavy lifting done that church planters strive to achieve, sometimes over a period of years. So, you know, there's that probably the least of what maybe the value truly is. They've been in a community for a long time. They know the people, they know the local culture. And while they may have ended up maybe with some missteps over years that have made them not as effective as they used to be, they still have a lot invested there. And I think part of the problem that I think a lot of these pastors face when their church has been in decline is kind of a, you know, a moral decline as well. Not moral, like immorality, but they're the, um, how they feel about things. Morale, morale, morale, not moral morale has declined. And, and, you know, one of my favorite things is to, is to come alongside those guys and, and just encourage them and say, you think, you know, No, not a hundred percent of the time, but usually it's not lost. I mean, we can, we can help you turn this around. So I think whenever they know that there's a support line, then, then, you know, we can see some positive change happen, but gosh, you know, we've got, we've got, well, you know, some stats even say like ninety, ninety-five percent of churches are plateaued or declining in the U.S. and then even more broadly speaking in the West, globally in the West. And I just think it's it's too there's too much invested and there's too much opportunity to pass that by. I think we can we can help turn these things around and and see the kingdom of God, you know, expand again through those ministries and and touch the lives of people closest to them. Yeah, I think there's a danger in feeling as though churches are disposable and that church leaders are disposable. And so I think that you're right. When there has been a generation or multiple generations of people who have invested in a ministry, in a property, in a... a church's evangelistic footprint in a community. And even though that footprint might not be as strong or solid as it once was, um, there's a history and, and a reputation that, uh, that, well, there's a reason that the people who are still in the church are still there. You know, maybe the church once was a hundred and fifty or two hundred and fifty or four hundred people. And now it's down to maybe a couple of dozen. There's a reason why some of those folks are still there. And, um, I think it's honorable to at least assess each church and evaluate its viability and do everything that we can to preserve it. Speaking of assessing, there are going to be a lot of pastors, church leaders, maybe elders or board members listening to this podcast episode. And they're asking themselves the question about maybe, where they are in their church's life cycle. Are we sick? Are we stuck? Are we stagnant? Are we in need of revitalization? What do we really need? And everybody's looking for the silver bullet, right? What's the silver bullet? What's the magic prayer I can pray that will turn this church around? Before we start trying to provide solutions, sometimes we need to do some self-evaluation to really assess where we are, what areas maybe we're doing well in, what areas maybe we're not. What are some things or some steps that you think church leaders can take or leadership team can take to do some self-evaluation of their health? Yeah, well, I mean, for us, the way we handle that is with some just actual assessments that we've developed over years that we just continue to use with every church we work with. So, I mean, we do one called the Church Ministry Analysis, and it's a little more comprehensive, and it's intended for leaders in the church. It's not a church-wide thing. But we focus in on a few what we think just are some really key, important areas of the church to assess. starting with the mission focus of the church. I mean, we believe the Great Commission is the mission given to all of Christ's churches around the world, that we should be making disciples and maturing disciples. And so has the church lost that focus? Most of the time, yeah, one side or the other of the Great Commission, they either lost an evangelistic focus or they lost the discipleship focus. So assessing the church's current status within that mission is important. we assess what does the church presently value? Not what they say they value and what's on their website, but by their actions, what do they value? And how does that compare with some biblical actions that we should see that every church should value to drive their behavior? And then discipleship pathway, like how intentional is the church in building up believers? So we assess that, whether that's So many declining churches, they're just kind of going through the motions. They're just doing the same things they've always done. And so we look at that. And then vision. Is the church pursuing something future-focused or not? And that's a common denominator among most declining churches is a lack of future-focused vision that they're communicating to their people. So that's another point of assessment as well. Can I plug something? Yeah, please do. Around assessment. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We've got a free tool that we have been running here at the beginning of twenty twenty five called the Church Checkup Challenge. And so if anybody wants to go to Malpertroop.com slash challenge, it's a it's a seven day email sequence. So you sign up. Doesn't cost anything. You're going to get a simple activity every day. There's a video attached to it to help you assess your church through those things I just talked about. Um, and as included in that is a, is free, um, seven day full access to our healthy churches toolkit, which is loaded with resources. But malphursgroup.com slash challenge is a very simple daily drip fed assessment process, um, through those key things I just talked about. I want to talk a little bit about the toolkit a little bit later on in our conversation, but I'll make sure to link to that page in our show notes as well. AJ, when we're going through an evaluative process, this is where personally I've sometimes struggled. is sometimes it's hard for churches to really be honest about where they are. And even for us coming from the outside in, sometimes it can be really difficult for us to be honest about where the church is because we love and respect and we don't want to hurt people. Like that's never the goal is to point at you and say, you're bad church. You're not doing things well. You're probably displeasing Jesus more than you're pleasing Jesus. Like that's a terrible diagnosis to have to give to the church. Yeah. In your experience, what are some of the primary hangups or holdups that you see with a church not being willing to be open about where it truly is? So for instance, I'll use this analogy. If I go to the doctor, which I've got a doctor's appointment here in a couple of weeks, and I go in to get my lab work done and they check me out and they tell me, that I have a serious disease and that I need treatment, I can walk out in denial and say, but I don't feel sick. Like I look in the mirror and I think I look reasonably healthy. I feel reasonably healthy. I don't really need to listen to you. That's actually probably closer to what I see with a lot of churches when someone comes and says, You're probably not trending in the right direction. There are probably some things that you could do that would get your church unstuck, get you going in a healthier direction. But there's always a real challenge for the churches to be honest in their self-evaluation. Can you speak to that? Speak to those that are in need of that honest gut check about where they are? Yeah, it's absolutely necessary to come to a realization that you need help, that you're not healthy, that you're not where you want to be. So we don't do cold call sales. We're not just calling up churches to see if they might want revitalization. Every church we've ever worked with came to us. And so something drives that decision. You Google searching healthy church revitalization, and you find us or you, Bart, and then you initiate a phone call. So someone in the church usually has a sense. Things aren't as they should be. We're not where we should be. We're not living up to our God-given potential. And so that's a start. But then there's always this barrier that a lot, not always, but many times that a pastor or a church elder or some other leader has to has to overcome. And that's convincing enough people that were unhealthy to actually try something new. So which is where assessment is really helpful as well. If we can at least get leaders to agree to assess, then they're faced with your analogy. And we've used this exact same one. You go if you ask the doctor to run some tests on you, you have a choice to make at that point. Do I believe him? Do I want to do that work or do I want to ignore it? And again, we can't make anybody change. And we tell every single church we work with, you know, we will we will lead you through this with the greatest capability and resources we have. But we cannot make you do the work. You have to want it. And and so, you know, that becomes our biggest prayer for churches that they that they would want it bad enough to overcome that. the, the comfort zone issues and the, the uncomfortable conversations and the real honest difficulties that it takes to revitalize a church. I mean, I'm sure you do the same thing. You tell you nobody in our space part would, I would hope would never tell a church that's going to be easy. It is always hard, but it's possible. And so, but yeah, that we, we want to see them invest in it and, and we're there to partner. Yeah, I use the statement all the time that we serve a God who's in the business of bringing dead things back to life. But then I have a little, with the church, I have the little princess bride moment where it's not complete death. It's partial death, right? We're not completely dead. We're just mostly dead, right? So it is tricky. So let's assume, okay, I'm a pastor. I'm a church leader who recognizes that my church is stuck. It's not where... We're not reaching our full potential for God's kingdom. We've done some self-evaluation and... We recognize that there's work that we need to do and we're ready to do that work. Before we talk about maybe some of the right things to do, can you point to some of the wrong things that you've seen church leaders do or some of the missteps that you've seen church leaders make as they attempt to lead their church out of decline? Yeah, it does come down to a few things that we see over and over, but we just almost always come back to leadership. I mean, the leaders of the church have to lead well, and they have to lead with some strength or fortitude. And I use the comparison all the time of the Israelites coming out of Egypt. You know, I mean, Moses had a vision and they bought into it. They're like, I think this guy is the guy and I like what he's telling us. I like the future he's pointing out. But you know what happened then? They got out in the desert and it was tough. And no matter how good that vision sounded to them when they started, they it just was too much for them to bear. And then they get the bad news about giants in this, in this land. And they're like, we can't overcome that. You know, Egypt started to look pretty good to them again. And that happens with churches too. They get, they, they have that initial bump where, you know, it's exciting and like, okay, I think we can do this. But, you know, a few months in, six months in, a year into the work and they're like, wow, you know, Egypt was kind of looking pretty good. We could go back and do what we used to do. And it takes forever. fortitude and leadership to lead through that and bring them or drag them into the promised land. And unfortunately, you know, a lot, excuse me, a lot of pastors, they, they, they don't have that, you know, where they can continue to charge forward when there's pushback and there will be, and there's people that doubt. So that's a big one right there. You know, communicating well, transparency through the process is important. You know, I mean, people don't, People will make up all kinds of stories in their head about what we're doing or what we think our leaders are trying to do if we're not really clear about what it is we're doing and engaging them in the work, too. It can't ever be an us and them, you know, leaders versus the church of what we're doing. So leadership, big one. Communication, another big one. I'm going to point out two things that I think are often missteps that leaders make. One of them is relying too much on cosmetic change that they believe will bring cultural change, and it doesn't. So it's changing the name, painting the building, sprucing up the building, getting rid of a few ministries, starting a few new ministries, and changing the ministry, the worship style, thinking that the cosmetic aspects are going to bring the cultural change that needs to happen. And and I know that you guys are really, really big on this, and we're going to talk about this in just a minute, but the church, if it's going to get into a new season, if it's going to bear fruit again, if it's going to reach its full potential for Jesus, it's got to start with an internal cultural change. You talked about values earlier. What are the values that we state that we have? What's really playing out as we exist as a church? What do our values really need to be? What does the culture of this church really need to be in order to reach the culture that God has called us to reach? And So we've got to work from the inside out. The other thing, and I've probably said this on pretty much every episode of this podcast that we've done is too much, too fast. I think that that is a common mistake that a lot of leaders will make, particularly if it's a new pastor or new leader that's been called to the ministry. Oh yeah. Too much, too fast. Yeah. I'm not going to promise that God won't require you to spend forty years in the wilderness of revitalization like Moses did, but it's probably going to take more than four months. And I think that's the mistake that I see a lot of leaders make is they just want to go too far, too fast, make too much change too quickly. And they create whiplash and disruption and chaos in the context of their community instead of leading and shepherding their people well to the new season, to this new promised land that God has for them. Yeah, we always caution, you know, I mean, over the years, many times we've gotten calls and had meetings with pastors that were new to a church. And we would never counsel anybody that's been there less than six months for sure about kicking off a revitalization work. You have to build relationships. You have to really get to know that church and the culture and everybody. So, yeah, so I think you're right. You know, something else on the subject of kind of like timeline or how quickly you move. Something else that we think is important is not spending an inordinate amount of time planning. We work and we've strived really hard to make our process one that the planning gets done pretty quickly. And then the work can can go then on a reasonable pace because people get bored. There's an illusion that us meeting and talking about things and planning is actually doing the work and it's not, but it feels like it, you know, you spend six months or a year planning something and everybody, you know, is maybe still excited, but then you kind of get near the end of it and they're like, wow, we just completed our planning unit. Everyone retired. We've been meeting a lot. And like we haven't actually done anything. It feels like we did, but we haven't. So we'd like to see planning happen relatively quickly and get started doing something, because then you can build momentum, keep people's morale up and and be able to start making, you know, maybe some small changes at first and then just work that out. Just incremental changes month after month, year after year. Yeah, you talk about a new pastor often, oftentimes, in our ministry, many of the churches that we're working with, we're working with because they have been through a pastoral transition. They've had a pastor for twenty five, thirty, thirty five years, the church has been stuck stagnant for a while. And churches like that are have very, very, very have a very difficult time calling a new pastor. Because what they have to offer certainly isn't as shiny and spiffy as maybe other church opportunities that are out there. So oftentimes we are specifically partnering with a church as they're going through a leadership transition. And then the road after that leadership transition is going to be a revitalization season. And literally one of the things I do, I send them a little workbook, every new pastor that I put together, it's called your first one hundred and eighty days. And that first one hundred and eighty days is pretty much everything that you should be doing that has nothing to do with revitalizing the church. It's reading some books, building some relationships, getting acclimated into the community, meeting civic leaders, reading meeting minutes from the last six years, working board meetings and council meetings, becoming an expert on the history of that church. In short, it's putting relational marbles in the jar with all the people who called you to be their pastor because six to twelve months from now, when we do start to revision the church and start implementing some change, you need relational capital. Otherwise, the people who called you to be their pastor, they're going to run you out with pitchforks because they didn't bring you to bring change. They brought you to be their pastor, to be their shepherd. And obviously part of the conversation is typically there's going to be change that happens. I mean, even a healthy church who calls a new pastor, the new pastor is going to implement some level of change. But hopefully he's got the wisdom and the experience to know to go slow and to make those relational investments before putting foot on the gas pedal. Man, you know what? One of us needs to develop some really good search committee training, you know, so that they really are thinking about these kinds of questions in the process of calling a new pastor. So maybe we can collaborate on that because that's that's an important season for a church. yeah determining being able to really identify who we are uh who we think we're looking for and then man having some really deep honesty with uh with potential pastors you know from the church side and the pastor side everybody wants to look their best um and and I think we need some real transparency and honesty in that process so that we get you know the best marriages of pastors and churches to happen Yeah, it's interesting that you say that because at the time that you and I are recording this, we just dropped an episode of our podcast about six days ago. And the focus of that is actually on pastoral search teams. One of my teammates, his name's Ed Short. I'll link to this particular episode in the show notes here. Ed has helped dozens of churches over the last decade or two navigate this very, very complex situation. process of calling a new pastor. What makes it really complex with most of the churches that we're working with, and I'm assuming that a lot of the churches you work with would be similar, is that they haven't probably done a search in the two thousands. And with the advent of the internet and seminaries changing and the way that pastors go about even looking for a call, looking for a ministry, it's changed completely. So there's so much in the landscape of the search process that is complex and it's more complex because it's like a marriage, right? We're taking two... entities that are different, have different backgrounds, and we're kind of speed dating. And we're hiring somebody to be our pastor who we're really making a covenantal relationship with in a lot of ways. And so, man, it is really tricky. But we can work on some stuff together. We will nail this someday. I want to talk a little bit about the Malfers Group process. This is really, I learned a ton from videos that I watched of Dr. Malfers and his book, is it Advanced Strategic Planning? Advanced Strategic Planning, yeah. Yeah, great book. I'll link to that in the show notes, Advanced Strategic Planning. Learned a ton. Can you talk a little bit about the emphasis that you guys place on sort of a team approach to revisioning a church? What does it look like when you're working with a church and you're putting that strategic vision team together or whatever it is that you call it and why you think it's so important to do it that way yeah yeah we we call it the strategic leadership team and we so we that's one of the first orders of business is helping a pastor or elders or whoever our our point people are to put together a team we typically have that team run twelve to fifteen people depends on the size of the church you know for us we mostly work with small mid-sized churches so the size of that team is not in stone. It might vary, but, um, you know, I mean, we just believe having, having multiple voices speak into the process with the, with the Holy spirit, um, it's just going to yield great results. And so, um, Yeah. So, I mean, we encourage, you know, men, women, different ages. Not that it's supposed to be, you know, democratic and represent the entire church, but just have a variety of perspectives and backgrounds and histories in the church speak into it. And it's eye-opening because, you know, so many times a lot of major decisions are made just by the same few people. Um, and so it engages a little bit, uh, more broad perspective from the congregation. Um, I think it's beneficial from the congregational perspective as well to say, Oh, well this, I can't, you know, that's cool that that person is going to be a part of this. Um, they've, you know, they're not the same people that we always see. Um, But yeah, we just really believe the Holy Spirit will work through all of those people just as he would through the pastor or through elders and just get a little bit bigger perspective there. So let's clarify that. The people who are part of that strategic leadership team are not necessarily the governing leaders in the church. It's not the elders. It's not the deacons. It's a group of people that I guess you're coaching the pastor to identify who should be a part of that. And what's some of the criteria? What's some of the characteristics that you're looking for in the people who are part of that team? Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, these are going to be ministry leaders. So there's people that have been engaged in the church. They're not somebody that just shows up, you know, a few Sundays a year. So they're leading, probably leading ministry areas in the church, you know, and from a volunteer perspective. Now, we also work with some bigger churches that have got, you know, a lot of paid staff. Those churches, it's probably going to be most of the paid staff doing it because they're the ones leading ministries. But in smaller churches, obviously not the case. So the pastor or various pastors are going to be on that team. Some representation from the elders or whatever their primary oversight council is if they don't use elders. And then a variety of ministry leaders. We're looking for people with godly character. We're looking for people that are future focused, that are active participants in the church, but they're excited about the church. People that respect the authority of those in the church, but also, you know, they've got valid opinions and experiences that would speak into it. We want it to be a positive group of people that all feel positively about the potential for the future of the church working together. And we've got a couple of, you know, real simple tools that we provide to the church, you know, a spreadsheet with some areas of criteria that they can help, you know, kind of brainstorm people that might be on that team. But yeah, that's who we're looking at. We refer to them as known leaders, people that are respected leaders. Um, you know, we, we, we say, uh, we recommend not inviting people that have been a problem. Like they're historically combative. Um, you know, we, I mean, we learned this the hard way because sometimes the pastor is like, well, this will be the thing I can invite this person into. And it'll just bring us together and it doesn't. So we always say don't invite the problem people into it. Have positive people, not yes people that are just going to rubber stamp whatever the pastor says. But yeah, they want to see the church succeed. There's the old saying, keep your friends close and your enemies closer, but that's not the room. I'm watching the clock here and we have a hard stop in just a few minutes. I have a couple more things that I want to cover. One of which is, I would love for you to share a little bit about the Healthy Church Toolkit that you guys launched last year. Can you share a little bit about what that is and what the benefit for a pastor subscribing to that service would be? Yeah, man, that was many years in the making and a great vision piece from my best partner in ministry, Scott Ball, our vice president and co-host of our podcast. But yeah, so we launched the Healthy Churches Toolkit last September, and it really is a collection of almost everything that we do, plus some other really cool things. So we wanted to have all of our resources in one place. So we had recorded all of the training that we do with churches for our health process and our leadership development process. We've got all those training videos in there that are available in the toolkit that people can learn how to organize their church that way. We've got dozens and dozens of resources in there that not only that we've developed, but come out of Dr. Malfur's books. You've read Advanced Strategic Planning. You know, the last hundred pages of that book are all assessments and worksheets and workbooks and all these different things. So we've digitized most of his assessments and brought them into the toolkit. We're adding more of those monthly. We do monthly workshops. So we introduce a new tool every month and then we do a live workshop to show how it can be used. The thing that people have been most excited about is a couple of really cool AI tools. And I know some people cringe when they hear AI, but we've got small group discussion guide AI module in there where a pastor or anybody can take a sermon and input their outline or their transcript. and their primary passage. And in a matter of seconds, it'll produce small group discussion guides for you. So awesome tools like that. Social media posts, graphics for small churches that don't have a social media person. So it's just all kinds of tools and resources that a small church can use on a weekly, sometimes daily basis to make their life a little bit easier. I'm going to link to that in the show notes so that those who are interested in checking that out can. I'll tell you what interests me the most, and the part I'm going to go check out, is when people think of Malfur's Group, I think ninety-nine percent of the time, if they are familiar with Malfur's Group, they think about church revitalization. But I know that one of the things you guys really focus on is leadership pipeline, leadership development. You talk about it a lot on the podcast, and that has actually been a recurring theme over the last few episodes that we've had of this particular podcast is helping pastors identify leaders, invest in leaders, and lead leaders. And so I'm hopeful and I'm excited to check out that content myself to see what I might learn about building a leadership pipeline in my own church and just being more effective at that. I think One of the things that I consistently see as a challenge, especially in the normative size church, smaller to midsize churches, is pastors do have a tendency to probably do too much and empower too little. And when they do empower, a lot of what they're doing empowerment-wise is really just assigning tasks or delegating versus actually empowering leaders. I think in order for a church to really reach its full potential and to really make the kingdom impact that it could, it does require plurality of leaders. And while there is a lead pastor or a senior pastor who is probably the person who's leading with the vision, the person who's probably preaching most of the time, there's so much more that the church can accomplish if we've actually got leaders. competent and well-trained leaders that could come alongside us to help us lead the church. We lift the lid, I think, of our potential. So I'm excited about checking that part out. Yeah, absolutely. Well, yeah, for sure. Jump in there and we'll be glad to make sure you have access to that, too. But it is it's vitally important. You know, it's what's holding the church back is not empowering people, not building into people. And we want to see that happen more and more. You know, and gosh, that's even only a selfish perspective is what can we do? What can the church benefit from it? Those people benefit so much more, you know. And you know this as well as any of us that have found our place in ministry. When you hit that, it's what a blessing that is, you know, to know this is how God wired me. And I found my place where I can serve him in his kingdom. And so it's a blessing to the church. It's a blessing to the people that are engaged in the work. Yeah, that's so true. As we wrap things up here, AJ, I would imagine, you know, there are pastors, there are church leaders, there are lay leaders listening to this podcast. Maybe some of them are a little discouraged. Maybe things aren't going real well in their church. Maybe this conversation has given them a little bit of hope. I hope it has. Can you speak to our audience? What would you say to a pastor or church leader or somebody who's maybe going through a difficult season of ministry now? Oh, man. Well, first of all, you are absolutely not alone. You know, I mean, Bart, you and I, this is what we're eating and breathing this stuff every day because we want them to know they're not alone. We want to come alongside them. So, yeah, reach out to reach out to somebody, you know, one of us that is in this space. I can't tell you how many phone calls we have that they I mean, most of our phone calls don't end in us working with a church, but they always end with a pastor or a leader knowing that there's there's things out there for him and that and that hope is not lost. And so, yeah, I just I do want to be encouragement to pastors today that no matter how alone you might feel in ministry, you're not. And there's people that they want to see you thrive and and they want to see you get back to that first vision you had, you know, whenever God called you to ministry or when you came to that church. Um, you know, I mean, you took that position when you took that position, you were thinking, this is going to be great. I know I can thrive here. Um, and maybe years later, it's not happening and we want to help you recapture that. Yeah, thank you. Well said. One of the reasons it was important for me to have you on our show, and I'm so grateful that you made the time for this, is that I get emails and phone calls pretty regularly these days since we launched this podcast from people who are looking for some help, some coaching, and some encouragement. And And while I am grateful for the opportunities to do that, our ministry, Assist Church Expansion, who produces this podcast, we work exclusively with churches that are part of our small fellowship of churches. So our ministry doesn't work with churches outside of our fellowship, although we do create these resources and we've got content as well as other resources on our website that are free for anybody to use. Our coaching and our consulting is limited. We work within one specific family of churches, but Malfur's group does not. You guys work with a lot of different churches, a lot of different denominations. And so I wanted to make sure that people get a chance to get to know you. At the very least, they should be listening to your podcast. That's number one. Number two, they should probably subscribe to the Healthy Churches Toolkit. But if they want to engage with you at a deeper level, what's the best way for them to reach you, A.J. ? Yeah. I mean, just go to malphursgroup.com. Um, it's pretty easy to, to connect with us there, um, schedule a meeting and, uh, and we'll jump on a zoom call and, uh, get to know you, hear about what's happening with your church. So yeah, just start, just hit the website, malphursgroup.com. And, uh, I think it's pretty easy to find how to, how to get to us without giving people too many links that they have to think about or remember. Well, thank you so much again for taking the time to be with us on the show today. For those of you who've made it all the way here to the end, hope it has been a blessing and encouragement for you. Make sure that you check out the show notes because we mentioned a whole bunch of stuff that you're going to probably want to check out. links and otherwise. And again, just a reminder that if you haven't subscribed wherever you listen to your favorite podcast, make sure that you subscribe so you don't miss any of our future episodes. And if you happen to be watching on our YouTube channel, give us a little like and leave a comment. Love to engage with you there. Again, on behalf of AJ Matthew from Malfers Group, I'm Bart Blair. Thanks for tuning in to the Revitalize My Church podcast.