The Rusty George Podcast

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Narrator
Welcome to Leading Simple with a Rusty George. Our goal is to make following Jesus and leading others a bit more simple. Here's your host, Rusty George.

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Rusty George
Well, it's so great to have you. Welcome to Leading Simple. I'm your host, Rusty George. And today we have a repeat offender. Karl Vader's is back with us. He's been on the podcast before. He is a mentor to many church leaders, especially those who are working with smaller congregations. And Karl is the author of two books about small churches, small church essentials and the grasshopper myth.

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Rusty George
On his blog Pivot, he writes about innovative leadership several times a week from a small church perspective. He's also the founder of a new small church icon and ministry that encourages and connects and equips innovative small church pastors. His heart is to help pastors of small churches, which is about 90% of the churches in America. And right now, many churches that used to be large are feeling smaller due to the pandemic.

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Rusty George
And so many of us are beginning to go back to some of the principles we learned in the early days of church growth and pastoring and leading a smaller congregation. No matter if you're leading in a church or you're a leader in a church, you lead a business, but you think like a church leader. This is going to be helpful for you.

00;01;32;13 - 00;01;57;25
Rusty George
I think you're going to really enjoy our conversation with Carl Vader's today. Hey, I want to let you know that today again this month, we are sponsored by Stadia. Stadia is an incredible organization whose mission is to plant churches that intentionally care for children. And why is that? Because as more churches close their doors due to the pandemic and just a declining church attendance, fewer people are experiencing the life changing hope of Jesus.

00;01;58;08 - 00;02;19;08
Rusty George
And stadia prepares leaders to start healthy churches that intentionally reach the next generation of believers, spreading the hope of Jesus farther than ever before. We'd love for you to be a part of this. And maybe some of you were thinking, I'd like to give a donation to a stadium. You can do so through stadia, church planting, dot org stadia, church planning and dot org.

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Rusty George
And if you're thinking about being a church planner, hey, check that out as well. Also, go to stadia. Church planting. Dot org. Well, here is my conversation with Carl Vader's. Here we go. Carl Vader's no relation to Darth.

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Karl Vaters
Vader that we know of anyway.

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Rusty George
Yeah, not that we know of. Hey, buddy. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. Welcome back.

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Karl Vaters
Oh, you're great. Grateful to be with you.

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Rusty George
So, Karl, you have carved out a niche for yourself in really helping pastors, but specifically pastors of smaller churches. It seems like there's a lot more pastors in that category now because of COVID and the pandemic and everything that we went through in 2020, 2021. That made a good percentage of people that used to call our churches home, but maybe they only came once every six weeks, eight weeks, Christmas and Easter.

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Rusty George
They just kind of disappeared. And so a lot of pastors are waking up in 2022 realizing my church is much smaller than I thought it once was. What what learnings should we take from that and what are the benefits we should grab a hold of now that our church might be a little bit smaller or even more manageable for every pastor out there?

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Karl Vaters
Yeah, I love the first half of that question. What we what can we learn from it? I mean, my dad taught me this when I was younger. Whatever you go through, especially when it's a difficult circumstance, make sure you learn something from it. So like I had my first job in a peach processing plant in Modesto, California. One of my first jobs, a graveyard shift.

00;03;56;22 - 00;04;10;14
Karl Vaters
They put me on the on the belt with peaches moving past me. And I had to find the ones that had the hadn't come out of and I had to pull the pin out of it. What I didn't realize was for the first few hours that you're on it, the belt is moving. After the first few hours, the belt isn't moving anymore.

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Karl Vaters
You're moving. It becomes yeah.

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Rusty George
Wow.

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Karl Vaters
It's it's really weird. Yeah. And just about before I was about to fall over the long timers who were watching the new kid pulled me off of there and then put me on the place where I had to pull the rotten peaches out of the. So it's a miserable thing. So I would go home and my dad would go, So how was work?

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Karl Vaters
I was terrible. And I hate it. And they'd go, But what did you learn from it? The first night what I learned from it was, It's terrible and I hate it. He went okay. The second night he said, What else did you learn from it? I go, I don't want to do that for the rest of my life.

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Karl Vaters
Okay, third night, what did you learn from it? I don't want to do it the furthest of my life. And what else did you learn from it? Well, I guess if I'm not going to do this for the rest of my life, I probably ought to get a pretty good education so I can do something else. There you go.

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Karl Vaters
You learned something. So my dad always taught me that even in the worst of circumstances and sometimes especially in the best of circumstances, you can really learn something from it. So in what we've been going through for these past couple of years, you know, we can sit and we can whine and complain, get angry, and there's plenty to whine, complain and get angry about.

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Karl Vaters
Or we can look at it and say, When I come out of this, I'm determined that I am going to take more out of this than it takes out of me.

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Rusty George
That's a great line.

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Karl Vaters
And the only way the only way that I can get more out of it than it gets out of me is if I learn something from it. I am going to learn something constantly from all of this. This is an amazing learning experience, if we will take it that way. Not an easy one. Not one I ever want to go through again.

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Karl Vaters
I'm not pretending that it's something wonderful when it is not, but I am going to get something of value out of it. So yeah, that's the first thing. We can learn stuff from it. And I mean from from the very beginning of it, we learned the technological stuff, right? I mean we've got, we went from you probably should be online to we are all online.

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Rusty George
Right.

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Karl Vaters
And, and basically if you're not online in most places for a lot of people, you might as well not even exist because your online presence is the front door of your church. Your front door of your church isn't the front door anymore. So we've had to learn how to do online better and better. But I think the next step to that and the key thing that we can learn from that is this now that people can see pretty much any church online and they know they can so they can get the best preaching in the world online.

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Karl Vaters
They can hear the best church music in the world online. Why should they get out of bed on Sunday morning and come to your building?

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Rusty George
Hmm.

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Karl Vaters
If. When they leave your building on a Sunday morning, they are not thinking consciously and actively thinking. Wow, I'm glad I came today. I could not have gotten that online. If they're not thinking that when they leave, they won't come back. So we need to start asking ourselves, what are we providing in the input persons service that you can't get online?

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Karl Vaters
And this is not a put down of online. We do online will continue to do online. There are great values to that. But we now have a greater obligation, I think, to provide something wonderful when people actually do physically show up.

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Rusty George
And that's such a good word. Let me ask you about this. I hear a lot not a lot. I hear a few churches saying we want to get people back in the room. So we think the answer to that is just to shut off our online presence, to force them to come back. What would you say to that?

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Karl Vaters
Yeah, I think that's a bad idea. I know there's been a lot of talk about that recently. There was a big article in a big major newspaper about that, that everybody's been yelling about online, and I'm not going to be jumping into that conversation. But no, I don't think we should stop are we've learned how to do it.

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Karl Vaters
So let's do it. Well, the the initial numbers of wow, we've got five times more people watching online than we ever had in person. Those numbers have gone in most places. Yes, they've disappeared, as we should have known they would. But no, I think it needs to happen. There are two primary reasons. I think two primary benefits to the online worship service.

00;08;06;14 - 00;08;27;14
Karl Vaters
One, for those who can't physically come, whether they're ill or whether they're on vacation or whatever, they can watch online and they can feel connected to their local congregation or whether they're at risk and they're not able to come back yet because of the virus or whatever it is. The second thing is, as I said earlier, your physical front door is no longer your front door, right?

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Karl Vaters
Most people who walk into any church have watched it two or three times online before they come in. And what the online service does is it really helps people with the onramp. Walking into a church building for the first time is an incredibly intimidating experience.

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Rusty George
Hmm. Now, talk about that for a second. A lot of us listening have been going to church so long we forgot about that intimidating experience. What are we missing? What are people experiencing that we've forgotten about?

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Karl Vaters
Yeah. Well, imagine the best way I can frame it is imagine as a Christian, if I were to choose to go to a synagogue on a for a Sabbath service that I'd never been before. And I and I walk in and I'm not sure where the interest is when I walk in. Am I supposed to take one of those hats to put on my head as a man?

00;09;17;27 - 00;09;32;11
Karl Vaters
Are the women supposed to put that on if I do it? Am I insulting them? If I don't do it and I insulting them, I don't know. Where do I stand? Where do I sit? When the Torah comes around, what am I supposed to be doing? Why are they all dancing here? I've been in a synagogue and it's a wonderful experience.

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Karl Vaters
But it was. It was off putting. Every 5 minutes they were doing something that I didn't know how I was supposed to respond to it. And that's how people feel today. We think everybody has a church background and that is increasingly not the case. Right. We have to assume that they've never been inside a church before, even if they have, they've never been inside our church before.

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Karl Vaters
And here's the deal, because I'm minister to a small church is predominantly the smaller your church is, the more intimidating it is because it's. Yeah, right. You going to. Yeah. Going to a megachurch is like walking into the mall, right? We know the parking feels like the mall. The greeting feels like the mall, right? The entrance, the signage, it.

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Karl Vaters
They design it that way for the comfort of the first timer because, hey, they're familiar with the mall experience that give them that comfort. And then when they come in, when they hear the message, they have a gospel, but the onramp to the gospel, they're making it easy. Small churches, we just don't have that same experience. We don't have the ability to do it.

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Karl Vaters
And the smaller the church is, the more I know I'm going to be sitting with just a handful of people or just 20 people or just 50 people. It's way easier to sit in a room with a thousand people than it is to sit in a room with 20 people and way easier. So we have to go out of our way.

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Karl Vaters
What I encourage pastors to do is don't have a greeting team turn, turn your entire church into the greeting team, train every single person on how to greet the newcomer, because you don't know who that first person is that they're going to meet.

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Rusty George
Okay. Let me ask you about that. Train me right now. Tell me what I'm supposed to do and not do.

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Karl Vaters
All righty. I have an acronym I came up with. I'm not a big acronym guy, but since we repeat this a lot, I've turned this into an acronym. It's the gift acronym, greet, introduce follow up. Thank. So what we've done with our congregation members, here's what I've taught them. Every Sunday, when you come ask yourself, who am I going to greet this week?

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Karl Vaters
Or are there two people that I'm going to introduce to each other this week? Or am I going to follow up this week on somebody that I met recently? Or for the introverts in the group? Am I going to just thank somebody for a job well done? Mm hmm. Greet, introduce, follow up or think. And I started by doing it with our leaders.

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Karl Vaters
And then we tie it to our congregation members. And so they have this understanding where each week that I come, I'm going to have the responsibility to at least do at least one of those things. So for the extroverts, greet somebody new, fight for somebody who's maybe a little less extroverted. I know this person. I know that person, but they don't know each other.

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Karl Vaters
I'll introduce them to each other or I met this person three weeks ago. They came back again. I will follow up on them or I didn't meet anybody new, couldn't find anybody new. Forgot until the end of the service. I'm going to go thank the sound guy for a job well done. That's good. So those those are really simple.

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Karl Vaters
And the acronym helps us to remember it. And if everyone if we just remind our congregation members, you know, once every couple of months, hey, did you gift you? Did you give somebody this week? And we even put them on little cards that we printed years ago and put them in everybody's hands. And every once in a while, I'll still see one in somebody's Bible as they come in.

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Karl Vaters
It reminds them that we're all part of the team, and the smaller the church is, the more important it is for everybody to be activated in that.

00;12;50;28 - 00;13;00;19
Rusty George
Okay. I want to ask you about something you mentioned earlier, and I think this was our big learning through COVID as well. And that is if people are showing up in your building, they really want to be there.

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Karl Vaters
Yeah.

00;13;01;11 - 00;13;22;05
Rusty George
And because they could stay home and watch it, but they've chosen to get, you know, to get showered, dressed, drive. They're there. They're so the phrase we use is how can we create a non downloadable experience, something you can have in the room that you got that you wouldn't have online. Now you just gave us a great one here with the gift metaphor or acronym.

00;13;23;11 - 00;13;31;11
Rusty George
Give me a few more that you coach churches on to help people feel like, Wow, I couldn't have gotten this or received this if I stayed at home.

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Karl Vaters
Yeah, this is actually one of the places where the small church has the advantage over the large congregation, because the stuff they can't get at home is the stuff that healthy, small churches should be doing exceptionally well because they can get great preaching online, which is something the big churches do well. They can get great worship music online, which is something the churches do well.

00;13;53;09 - 00;14;11;15
Karl Vaters
What they can't get online is the personal touch. Someone who knows me, someone who will follow up on me, someone who says, Hey, how you doing? And when I say I'm doing fine. They can catch that little tremble in my voice that tells them I'm really not fine. And they'll go, Wait a minute, no. What? Something's going on.

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Karl Vaters
I can tell you you're not you today that can we talk about this? That can't happen online. You know, the the closeness of of laying on hands for prayer or whatever, those kinds of things cannot be done online. And we need to be able to reach out to people that way. And when we do so, then that's the experience.

00;14;33;21 - 00;15;00;21
Karl Vaters
It's that's again, the nice thing about it is when they walk away on a Sunday morning, it's in from a small church and they've had those close personal experiences. That's the thing that they're going to go, Oh, okay. That's why I physically need to be back in the building again. So it's not it's there's there's not this big divide between big and small churches on that anymore because small churches can do the personal touch as well, and sometimes even better than our big church friends can.

00;15;00;29 - 00;15;19;05
Rusty George
That's really good. I think that, you know, when I think back to, you know, some of the small churches, I served in when I was in college, you know, you're talking 20, 30 people. A lot of it was during the quote unquote fellowship time that went on between the worship and the teaching where everybody walk around, talk to each other.

00;15;19;05 - 00;15;26;14
Rusty George
And while that sounds a little bit dated or even cheesy for some people, there is an element to that that's very helpful. Don't you think?

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Karl Vaters
Yeah, very much so. I mean, I'm an introvert, so in my church, in my in the stand and greet time. But when I'm in another church, I understand how intimidating and strange and threatening that can feel to people. Yeah, I feel that very, very deeply. But in a big church that is that actually can feel kind of a hindrance.

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Karl Vaters
I mean, I'm in a I'm in a room of a thousand people. I'm going to say hi to a couple of people. It's not going to mean all that much. But in a small church, it actually can help to build the bridge interrelationship, especially if we've trained our people during that time. Don't just turn to your own friends and neighbors.

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Karl Vaters
Seek someone out who looks like you're standing alone or doesn't know what to do. Make sure that you draw them into that process.

00;16;11;16 - 00;16;31;05
Rusty George
Hey, let me interrupt this episode for just a second. Would you help plan a church today? You can do that in a very simple way. Go to stadia church planting dot org today to find out more. All right. Back to the show, Carl. You work a lot with different churches and helping them with their spiritual growth strategies and seems like one that we're always trying to crack.

00;16;31;05 - 00;16;54;17
Rusty George
Is this discipleship thing, whether it's small groups, whether it's Sunday school classes, whether it's one on one mentoring men's groups, women's groups, studies, so much stuff out there coming out of the pandemic, it seems like, you know, we're relearning a lot of things when it comes to help people grow in their faith. What do you see that is working really well, especially on the the small church front?

00;16;54;17 - 00;17;00;17
Rusty George
Are you seeing a lot of discipleship groups or more mid-sized gatherings or what are you noticing?

00;17;01;14 - 00;17;10;22
Karl Vaters
Well, at the beginning of the pandemic, we learned a whole bunch of stuff. One of the things we learned in the first few months was that there's still a phone on our phones.

00;17;10;22 - 00;17;11;06
Rusty George
Yes.

00;17;11;09 - 00;17;35;06
Karl Vaters
I was like, oh, wait a minute, we can use this to actually just call people. And we found that the old school phone call was as close as we could get to an analog touch with people when we couldn't actually physically be in the building together. So that really helped. And then from that, we realized this, this whole idea of the personal touch, especially when we can't get it on a regular basis, really, really mattered.

00;17;35;18 - 00;17;59;06
Karl Vaters
So this is something we need to lean into. There's been a lot of talk about the technology and about online church. We just talked about it and and we should and we should continue to do it. But the more we go online and the rarer the in-person experience is, the more valuable the person experience will become. When something becomes rarer, it becomes more valuable.

00;17;59;12 - 00;18;17;15
Karl Vaters
Hmm. So this is something that we need to be leaning into. Is it used to be just automatic church meant being in-person church does not mean being in person like it used to anymore. So when we do it, like we said already, we need to make sure that there's great value to it. That's the first part of it.

00;18;18;00 - 00;18;40;16
Karl Vaters
And then secondly, we we need to be leaning it. You use the word discipleship, and I think it's often the key that's missing, especially in smaller churches. We've got this most of the small church pastors that I talk to have great hearts, have great wisdom, have great biblical understanding, have a wonderful passion for Jesus and for their congregations.

00;18;40;16 - 00;19;07;08
Karl Vaters
But that too often translates into more of being a chaplain than being a pastor. And I'm going to way oversimplify by the role of chaplains. And if you are a chaplain and you are listening, you do far more than what I am about to describe, and you do it far better than I will describe it, but as a quick shorthand, chaplains typically bring ministry to people prison chaplain, military chaplain, hospital chaplain.

00;19;07;08 - 00;19;36;07
Karl Vaters
They go to those places and bring ministry to people who cannot come to church. That is a big part of the role of a chaplain. They do ministry for people. Most pastors are chaplains in our churches rather than pastoring our churches. We're doing ministry for people. And the way we move from chaplain ing to pastoring is to do what the Bible says the pastor is supposed to do, along with the evangelist and teacher, and write the best gifts out of Ephesians.

00;19;36;07 - 00;19;56;09
Karl Vaters
Right. What what those five leadership gifts are called to do. There's only one instruction we're given in that passage, and that is to equip God's people for works of ministry. Your primary job as pastor is not to do ministry for people. Your primary job as pastor is to equip them to do works of ministry for each other and within the community.

00;19;56;18 - 00;20;17;20
Karl Vaters
So discipleship is really the pastoral prime mandate, and that is often the biggest missing piece. And then sometimes when I teach that, I'll have somebody come to me afterwards and go, so I tried that. I tried delegating to people and it didn't work. And my response to that is I didn't use the D word as in delegate, I use the D-word as in disciple.

00;20;17;20 - 00;20;30;07
Karl Vaters
You cannot delegate to someone you have not equipped him. The Bible doesn't say delegate. The Bible says disciple and equip. And then you can delegate, but only after you've disabled and equipped them.

00;20;30;20 - 00;20;37;29
Rusty George
Are you finding this working more one on one, or let me get a bunch of people in a room and kind of just teach them.

00;20;38;19 - 00;20;41;00
Karl Vaters
Yes.

00;20;41;00 - 00;20;42;06
Rusty George
I knew you were going to say that.

00;20;42;06 - 00;21;09;28
Karl Vaters
Yeah, I know. And the smaller the church, the more the more you're going to have both of those for the best way. The ideal is the smaller group, because then the group can support each other and then the entire weight isn't on the relationship. Too often when it's just one on one, sometimes it it can become this dysfunctional relationship where it's so completely dependent on the other person being in the room that somehow I can't grow until my mentor is here.

00;21;09;28 - 00;21;30;20
Karl Vaters
But when you understand, hey, even the people who are going through this process with me, they can teach me and I can teach them immediately. Their it's not just simply a downloading of information from the wise sage. It is an ongoing conversation and relationship with others who are also in a spiritual journey and the different spots in that spiritual journey.

00;21;30;26 - 00;21;49;08
Karl Vaters
So the best is the small group. The smaller the church is, the less likely you're going to have five or six or ten new young growing Christians to do in a group. And you may just have one. So if you've got one, have one, but get them into relational groups as often as possible.

00;21;49;08 - 00;22;07;07
Rusty George
Do you sense right now, I mean, with with churches being smaller than they used to be and we just came out of the pandemic where we were all cooped up in homes, doing church, watching online. It seems like every now and then there's a there's a spike in interest in house churches. How would you define that versus a small church?

00;22;07;15 - 00;22;18;17
Rusty George
Obviously, location means part of that. And are you seeing a spike in that? And and what's the benefit of that or the benefit of just simply being at a location in a smaller church?

00;22;18;17 - 00;22;42;14
Karl Vaters
Yeah, they both have benefit. I'm obviously you can't say the house church has no value. That's how the church, the early church grew for very fast, for a very long period of time. Right. But for most people, for me, I'm a I'm an extreme introvert. And the idea of showing up at some stranger's house, it's like, no, give me a neutral third place where we can meet that any one of us can show up to and can leave.

00;22;42;14 - 00;23;01;12
Karl Vaters
And nobody kind of owns this space. It's neutral third place. And I think that's really a helpful buffer for a lot of people. So are there problems with the industrial corporate church structure? Yes, there are a lot of things about it that, you know, the early disciples would look at and go, this is church. I mean, I get that too, even though I'm in one of those churches.

00;23;01;24 - 00;23;28;04
Karl Vaters
So, yeah, this there's there's a lot of rethinking about church right now, and I think most of it is good. I think we constantly need to be asking ourselves, is this the best way to do this? Is this how God really wants us to do church? Is this the way that we can best make disciples and allow opportunity for ministry and and worship Jesus together and all of those things?

00;23;28;14 - 00;23;49;18
Karl Vaters
And I think for a couple of generations in North America, we because it was working numerically, we just kind of settled into this church building that looks like this with pews bolted to the floor, with a 30 minute sermon, with singing songs out of the hymn book and then off the off the screen. But it was pretty much the same pattern.

00;23;49;18 - 00;24;19;12
Karl Vaters
And even the most innovative churches were still doing that pattern. They were just doing it with cooler clothes and newer song. Right? That what that was what we call the innovation. And it really wasn't. It was just it was just a stylistic adjustment to the same basic pattern of things, right? So I am always open to looking at new ways of doing things as long as we are staying strong with the things that can't change, which obviously is, you know, the gospel of Jesus, salvation through Christ and so on.

00;24;19;21 - 00;24;41;10
Karl Vaters
But as long as we're theologically firm, let's yeah, let's be open to different ways of doing things. I think it's one of the patterns that I've seen in the last 30 years. Maybe that has really been refreshing. When I grew up, my first 30 years of my life, anytime somebody came up with a new idea about how to do church, everybody jumped on it not as an option, but as the way you have to do it.

00;24;41;11 - 00;25;05;28
Karl Vaters
Right. I mean, I'm old enough to remember back to the day of bus ministry, yet getting busses of kids into the church was the way to do it. And then for a while it was the the robocalls. There was there was a season in the nineties where a bunch of ministries told you, here's how you start a church, you make 20,000 robocalls, and you'll get a 1% response, which means you'll have 200 people on the first day of your church launch.

00;25;06;03 - 00;25;30;20
Karl Vaters
But they forgot to tell you was that that would drop down to 20, which was your which was your your starter group by the second Sunday because robo calls don't sustain a church. But and each one of them was presented kind of as the way to do it. And now we've learned, okay, here's a new way. So now we got multi-site, for instance, and I don't know anybody out there saying multi-site is the way to do church.

00;25;30;20 - 00;25;46;12
Karl Vaters
They are saying here is a way to do church and that's better. We're now realizing there's this big tool belt with a lot of different tools in it and you pick the tools that work for you. And if you come up with a new tool that helps some people do it, then let's add that to the tool belt.

00;25;46;12 - 00;25;55;06
Karl Vaters
Let's get that out there. But let's stop with this is the only way to do church thing anymore. And I think that's that's happening in a healthy way right now that I'm grateful for.

00;25;55;22 - 00;26;20;00
Rusty George
That's so good. I'm glad you brought that up, because there was certainly back in the early days, as you said, for us, a sense of there's a silver bullet out there and we've got to find it. And oftentimes those just worked at the right time and place and they wouldn't necessarily work where you are. So I want to ask you a little bit about metrics, because we're beginning to measure different things.

00;26;20;09 - 00;26;49;07
Rusty George
The old knock was churches just value absences, the attendance buildings and cash. But despite or in spite of what's happened during the pandemic and church sizes and the multiple ways that we are doing ministry now, what are we valuing now? What are we measuring now? What should we be measuring? I heard of a metric the other day. Somebody said, What if you just said, Hey, for this next year we're going to count the number of hospital visits we make and we're going to value that for a year.

00;26;49;13 - 00;26;52;27
Rusty George
That's a great idea. Are you seeing some other trends that way as well?

00;26;53;09 - 00;27;21;05
Karl Vaters
I am. For the first time I've been and I'm 62. I've been I'm a preacher's kid. So I've been in some form of ministry for all of my life, but actually in, you know, pastoral ministry for over 40 years. And I am seeing for the first time, even in just the last five years, slightly pre-pandemic, but especially with pandemic, that there's a move away from attendance being the the only thing that mattered.

00;27;21;18 - 00;27;43;17
Karl Vaters
And now we're even seeing a lot of church leaders saying not only is it not the only thing that matters, but it may actually give us a false positive in the big churches and a false negative in the small churches where there may be greater things going on and that the numbers are actually making us look in the wrong way and at the wrong things, and that there are other things we need to measure.

00;27;43;18 - 00;28;09;20
Karl Vaters
And the challenge for the small church is metrics. The bigger the number is, the more the metrics matter, and the smaller the number is, the the less helpful the metrics become. It's just the nature of size. So if you've got like if you've got a massive company, you know, that's traded on the wall on Wall Street. Right. And they have a 3% downturn last quarter.

00;28;09;20 - 00;28;27;24
Karl Vaters
All of a sudden, there's panic on Wall Street because Apple had a 3% downturn. Right. Small churches. Are you kidding me? We can go 50, 100, 200%. Sunday to Sunday. And nobody blinks an eye because when you jump from 20 to 40 to ten, well, that's just because it's the middle of winter. And we had good weather one Sunday and bad weather the next Sunday.

00;28;27;24 - 00;28;49;22
Karl Vaters
It's just the way it goes. Right. But in a big congregation, if you went from 2000 to 4000 to 1000. Well, that's just that's what's going on. That's insanity right there. Right. Right. So the bigger the the bigger the numbers are, the more even small turns in metrics actually do tell you something about the health of the congregation and what's going on.

00;28;50;08 - 00;29;20;27
Karl Vaters
But when the smaller the church is smaller, the numbers simply don't tell you the story. It's not that numbers don't matter. It's not that we don't care about numbers. It's not that we don't count people because people don't count out. Take all of those stereotypes out of your hats, know what we're talking about here. But simply from a from a mathematical and statistical a as the scientific understanding of the nature of statistics, you've got to have a bigger sample size in order for the metrics to tell you the information you want them to tell you.

00;29;21;24 - 00;29;42;20
Karl Vaters
And in smaller churches, they don't matter as much. So all of that to say, yeah, we have to reconfigure metrics, especially in the smaller church because of that. But even the bigger church folks are seeing that. So yeah, we need to look around and the metrics for the small church are going to depend on what is your mission and how well are you fulfilling that mission?

00;29;43;01 - 00;30;04;14
Rusty George
Yeah, that's great. You have a new book you're working on and I am, yeah. Empathetic to the fact that you are knee deep in the writing process and the fact that you could even talk about anything else right now is stunning to me. So well done. But tell me about the proactive pastor where this book come from. We're getting a sneak peek long before it's even published.

00;30;04;14 - 00;30;06;24
Rusty George
So tell us a little bit about this.

00;30;07;05 - 00;30;12;28
Karl Vaters
Yeah, thank you for that. This is the working title. So by the time it comes out, it could be called the donkey and the Frog.

00;30;12;28 - 00;30;17;05
Rusty George
Who knows the nature of publishing?

00;30;17;05 - 00;30;33;10
Karl Vaters
Oh, I know how that works. But yeah, right now it's called the proactive pastor and I've got actually a higher level of confidence that the book, the final title, is going to be something like that than I've had before. The premise is this for for a lot of years I've been asked, you know, if you could tell yourself something as a young pastor, what would you tell yourself?

00;30;33;10 - 00;30;52;17
Karl Vaters
And that answer kind of changed as I learned. But I've noticed in the last couple of years, as I look around at the mistakes I made as a young pastor and as I look around at the challenge as challenges and mistakes that are being regularly made by the pastors I work with, I started looking around and asking myself, Is there a trend that a lot of these have in common?

00;30;52;21 - 00;31;16;16
Karl Vaters
Probably 90% of them have this to the pastors who are is the difference between being proactive or being reactive to many pastors, and especially to many small church pastors? We're constantly in reactive mode because there's tons to react to. You have a personal connection with the congregation members, so when they call you up to go to the hospital, you go and you should, you know.

00;31;16;16 - 00;31;32;11
Karl Vaters
But if you only do that, if you're only in reactive mode, then you end up spending your time as you go week after week, looking back and going, What did I really accomplish this week? This is where a lot of our exhaustion comes out. A lot of our burnout comes from a lot of our wondering, am I really called to?

00;31;32;11 - 00;32;01;07
Karl Vaters
This comes from because we're letting other people determine our priorities and our schedules. And if I were to give myself one single piece of advice back, you know, 40 years ago when I was a young pastor, it would be this spend at least one hour of every ministry day doing something proactive rather than reactive. Make make it part of your schedule, your decision at least one hour every ministry day.

00;32;01;07 - 00;32;20;14
Karl Vaters
And it doesn't have to be absolutely every ministry day, but it should average out minimally. Two, If I'm doing five days of ministry per week, I should be doing 5 hours proactive that I choose to do to move towards something God has called me to do, rather than simply reacting to other people's schedules and urgencies.

00;32;20;26 - 00;32;28;13
Rusty George
Hmm. So that might be planning a vision task, writing a message, reading, studying, preparing those kind of things.

00;32;28;13 - 00;32;50;15
Karl Vaters
Yeah, writing a book, you know, like. Like, like the book. You know, I've written four books now. This would be book number five. There is nothing in my schedule today that urgently makes me sit down and write it. I have to choose to sit down and put something into existence that didn't exist before. And it's intimidating and it's hard and it never gets any easier, at least for me.

00;32;50;27 - 00;33;07;27
Karl Vaters
So if I don't choose to carve out that time and sit down and put in the blood, sweat and tears to make it get done, it won't get done. And in fact, most days it just feels easier to just look in my inbox and go, I'll just answer emails all day long and there's plenty of busy stuff to keep me busy.

00;33;08;05 - 00;33;08;15
Rusty George
Yeah.

00;33;09;01 - 00;33;38;09
Karl Vaters
So yeah, these are the things and as pastors, of course, everything we do is in some way not reactive but at least responsive. Even the things that we do that are proactive should be in response to God's call on my life, right? So God has called me to lead the church in this direction, and then I go week after week after week, and I'm not really leading them in that direction because I'm just responding to the emergencies and the urgencies in the few minutes of time that I've got, but, you know, off of my vocational job.

00;33;38;26 - 00;33;55;15
Karl Vaters
But if I really want to respond to God's call on my life, I have to put that on the calendar. And one of the first ways you do it is put it on the calendar. First, you got to look ahead and see is my if my an empty calendar. I used to look at an empty calendar and think it was an awesome thing.

00;33;55;15 - 00;33;56;23
Karl Vaters
It's actually a very dangerous thing.

00;33;57;11 - 00;33;57;25
Rusty George
It is.

00;33;58;09 - 00;34;01;06
Karl Vaters
Because if my calendar is empty, somebody else will fill it up.

00;34;01;06 - 00;34;04;22
Rusty George
Right? So they always find a way.

00;34;04;22 - 00;34;20;01
Karl Vaters
Yeah, there's there's the illustration that keeps going around. It is a great illustration. Right. They take the this the sand and they put it in the thing and then they put the small rocks and there's no room for the big rocks. Right. But if you put the big rocks in and then the pebbles and then the sand and then you can still pour water in, you've got to put the big stuff in first.

00;34;20;01 - 00;34;22;04
Rusty George
Yeah, it's an old Stephen Covey principle.

00;34;22;04 - 00;34;46;27
Karl Vaters
Yeah, exactly. So let's get those important things on there. The important things be proactive and it's surprising. Like I say, an hour a day is like, how can you get anything accomplished in an hour a day at a proactive hour every day for five days a week for a year? That's a book written right up. That is a a major change of direction for a church.

00;34;47;13 - 00;34;53;04
Karl Vaters
You can get in, you can get an extraordinary area amount accomplished when it's purposeful and proactive.

00;34;53;26 - 00;35;18;14
Rusty George
Well, that's such a good word. And for for all of our listeners who maybe aren't church planters or pastors, but you just lead in some kind of capacity. It's so easy to let our day be swept away with email, social media conversations in the hallway. They wasted time, reactionary moments when just a little bit of focus time every day where you shut everything off and go after it.

00;35;18;29 - 00;35;22;21
Rusty George
What you can really accomplish a lot over a limited amount of time.

00;35;22;29 - 00;35;47;09
Karl Vaters
Yeah, it even applies in parenting. Yeah. I mean, how many parents and I get it, we've had small, three small kids and when the grandkids over grand kids come over, wow, I, we were reminded again why parenting is for younger people and not for people my age, but a short period of where we go, okay, what are we going to choose to do with the kids tomorrow rather than just simply reacting to every diaper that needs to be changed and every meal that needs to be fed?

00;35;47;16 - 00;36;11;12
Karl Vaters
Right. And a short period of proactive activity is a guarantee of those will be the things that the kids will look back on and remember and rejoice in. And that this is this is these these are the moments between me and my parents that I remember the best. They won't be the reactive stuff, right? They'll be the proactive stuff that we chose to do for and with them.

00;36;11;22 - 00;36;20;17
Rusty George
Yeah, that's so good. All right. Well, for all of our listeners that would like to hear more from you, where can they find you? Your resources, your books and those kind of things?

00;36;22;03 - 00;36;36;22
Karl Vaters
Carl Vader's Tor.com If you spell my name right, you can find me there and call voters on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. That's a nice thing about having a name like mine. I don't have to add any weird numbers after my name to be found. A car elevators anywhere you'll find me.

00;36;37;06 - 00;36;54;28
Rusty George
And that is k a r l v tr. So Carl, as always, thank you. I get so many comments from people about our conversations and how much they love hearing from you. And you have done a lot to help out a lot of pastors, a lot of churches and their parishioners. So thank you.

00;36;55;15 - 00;36;57;06
Karl Vaters
Thank you. That's a blessing to me. I appreciate it.

00;36;58;03 - 00;37;15;10
Rusty George
Well, thank you for listening. I'm asking you, would you please go to wherever you listen to podcasts and leave a review? It's very easy to do. It does not take much time, but the more reviews we get, the more people find out about our podcast and we're able to help out more church leaders. So make sure you go and do that.

00;37;15;10 - 00;37;36;12
Rusty George
We are collecting all of those reviews. We will pick one out of the pile and give out an award, a gift at the end of the summer. And that's coming up here in just a few weeks. So make sure that you check that out and leave a review. Next week, we're going to have just a great conversation with somebody you may not have heard of, but you will not soon forget.

00;37;36;21 - 00;37;56;22
Rusty George
His name is Ricky Jenkins, and he's going to talk about overcoming church trauma, building multiethnic churches and discovering what to read. Rick, he's a great guy. He's actually had to come speak at our revival in October. You don't want to miss out for this. Well, thanks so much for listening. Share this with a friend. And as always, keep it simple.

00;37;57;07 - 00;38;20;08
Narrator
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