Simple Faith With Rusty George

0:00:00 - Rusty George
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Following Jesus isn't always easy, but it's not complicated. Join us each week as we work to make faith simple. This is simple faith. Have you ever tried to change something in your life? I don't necessarily mean, like you know, change your hair or change your color of your teeth or something like that. I'm talking about true internal life transformation. It can be hard. It can be hard to undo years of being in a rut. Well, today, in my conversation with pastor and leadership and life coach, Joseph Barkley, we get into what makes transformation simple. This is simple faith. You know, following Jesus isn't always easy, but it's not complicated, and each week on this podcast, we try to make faith a bit more simple. So glad to have you joining us. I'm your host, rusty George.

Today, my friend, Joseph Barkley is going to really help us out with understanding what true transformation looks like. I think you're going to be blessed by what he has to say. Hey, i want to thank our sponsor, subsplash. Subsplash has been a game changer for us from taking an app that maybe we could have created on our own to an actual platform through our app that really unites our church. If you're in a church where you feel like boy, i feel the need to give people so much on the weekends because I don't see them during the week and I don't have enough resources to put out on our website or they're not all going to our website. Friends, the app is where it is at and Subsplash can help you achieve that, so check out subsplashcom. Well, today, my conversation with Joseph King Barkley, or as I like to call him, jkb, is going to really help us in understanding transformation. Here's my buddy, joseph. I think you're going to really love this Joseph King Barkley, back on the podcast. How often do you use the middle name?

0:02:58 - Joseph King Barkley
Well, a lot, a lot more recently than I used to. I just like it. It's my dad's middle name, my grandfather's middle name, my great grandfather's middle name, and then I just I didn't have a son, and so the King likely, the King middle name likely, ends with me. So I thought, well, i'm just going to use it as much as I can.

0:03:20 - Rusty George
I don't believe any of that. You just made it up. You just want to go by, king Barkley, i'm sure I would.

0:03:26 - Joseph King Barkley
Yeah, i tried that out when I was a little kid, going by King Barkley, but for some reason it just never took. Nobody wanted to call me the King, so yeah, there was a.

0:03:35 - Rusty George
There was a basketball player for North Carolina named King Rice. I don't know if you know remember that guy. No, he played point guard for them. But I always thought, wow, now that's a cool name. You know, is that a given name or or what?

0:03:48 - Joseph King Barkley
But I mean, if you got to use it mine's, mine's given, so I come by it naturally, and I don't know that I've ever lived up to it.

0:03:56 - Rusty George
but well, in my mind you have, So it gives me a vision. Okay. So yeah, speaking of okay, last time you were on the podcast you were a pastor. Now you're an executive coach. Okay, this seems like a huge shift And, truthfully, coaching seems like a little bit of a to use the latest buzz term red ocean. There seems to be a lot of people out there in that arena. What, what? you know? what's the transfer rate here? What does one job have to do with the other, and how'd you get into this?

0:04:31 - Joseph King Barkley
Yeah, i, i loved being a pastor. I didn't step down because I didn't like my job, and I tell people a lot right now that there's a lot that I miss about the last season where I got a chance to help plant two churches and lead a church for seven years in Hollywood. But I don't miss my job as much as I miss my church, because I was able to retain so much of what I love about my job. You know I I'm a good communicator, but that's not what I loved the most. I think I really believe in the power of the platform and the spoken word, but that's not. I didn't really like live to do that, live to speak.

What I loved, what drew me to pastoring and what's drawn me to coaching, is I just love people and I want to get to know them intimately. I want to give them a space where they they have a chance to be honest about their fears and their hopes and their dreams And then in that, to introduce conversations that help them find purpose and hope and help And those sound like buzzwords, but when you're able to anchor that in something that has, over and over again for generations, proven to give people hope, not just optimism or a sense of purpose, not just you know a job or making more money. It's addicting and I know you know that. So, as when I was a pastor, i found myself naturally gravitating towards these conversations with people who were in the creative industry and who were in leadership, so founders, entrepreneurs, c-suite people, and so now I just spent 100% of my time doing that. Some of my clients are people of faith. They're Christ followers, many of them are not, and I still get to have the same kinds of conversations with both, with all kinds of people, because I've even found honestly Rusty that having conversations about the bottom line or about trying to retain great employees, all of that is kind of a trojan horse for those big questions that every human faces, and so it's a chance for us to talk about. Hey, let's say we do 10x this thing next year and add a zero and roll out that new product, what would it matter? And what's going on with your family, what's going on with your community when you're living in that new vision and that experience? So the other thing, too that I'll say, because I think you understand this, maybe some of your listeners do as well I actually get to have more of those powerful conversations on a plane.

Now that I say I'm an executive coach, then when I was saying I was a pastor because I would sit down this happened last night on my way back from San Francisco. You strike up a conversation, what do you do? And you say pastor, and sometimes people are like sweet, because I've got all of this garbage, i need to confess. Or you know, like I'm really afraid of flying. And do you think? you know, you think you could pray for me? But most of the time, frankly, people would shut down.

0:07:41 - Rusty George
Yeah, the airports go in.

0:07:42 - Joseph King Barkley
Yep, i don't want to wait into those waters, but when I'm, when I say I'm an executive coach, then huh. If they don't already have a sense of what that is, they ask. And it opens up great conversations about helping people go further faster in less time. But but pulling in like, could you also get there and be the healthiest you've ever been? Could you get there and feel more peace of mind than you ever have before? So again, it's just the transition, at least in terms of what I'm responsible for and what I'm investing my time in is actually not that different. I spend more of my time doing what I loved about being a local church pastor and church planter.

0:08:24 - Rusty George
You just not having to write a message every week.

0:08:27 - Joseph King Barkley
Yeah, I went from preaching I don't know 45, maybe weekends a year to this year. My wife and I have agreed that I'll only preach five. Wow, And that's a bit of a I'm grieving it a little bit. I sure I liked it more than that. I didn't need to do it. But only five a year is is is limiting. But the ages that are girls are out right now. We felt it was really important that I'm not traveling around preaching. Yeah, maybe one day it'll I'll do more of that, But right now you're right, I'm not having to write a message every week. Are you jealous?

0:09:09 - Rusty George
A little sometimes, okay, sometimes, that's probably one of my favorite parts of it. So, yeah, let me ask you this Executive coach, okay. Okay, It seems to me, because I've had coaches before, that it's a bit of a dance, because there are some coaches that they sit there on, you know, kind of like the guru, and they're waiting for you to ask questions, and so the monthly call is what's your problems and how can I help? versus the other coach is? the monthly call is take out your pen and paper. Let me tell you what you need to know. I know it's a bit of a dance, but for somebody who's going to have a coach, what are two or three things they should bring to the table every time they meet with that coach so that they both, they both get the best out of it?

0:10:00 - Joseph King Barkley
That's a great question, Yeah, what I think when you overplay one. So it's hey, what are we talking about today? Oftentimes, I find that people in the therapeutic space are better at fielding that kind of conversation.

0:10:13 - Rusty George
Yeah, so I have a therapist.

0:10:15 - Joseph King Barkley
My wife and I meet with him every week or every other week and we'll come in with Hey, here's what where it hurts this week, or here's where there's tension, or here's an idea we have with our kids. And Therapists, i find are particularly good at fielding those conversations. When coaches spend too much time there, i find they're not as affected. They're a little out of their depth. The other side that you described is where the coach comes in sort of as a, a provider of answers. That is, in its purest form, is more like a consultant or maybe even a mentor. So they are. There's someone you would sit down with and you want to take a ton of notes because, as I often say, you can either earn wisdom or you can steal it, and every chance you have to steal wisdom, do it because earning it is so painful and expensive. So when you sit down with a mentor or even a consultant, those generally are going to be women and men who have earned some wisdom And can give you something around a specific problem or a project. A coach is um, like it, the name would imply is someone who's there to explore what you're capable of. So you don't get a coach because something's broken. Necessarily That's for a doctor. You get a coach because you're already achieving on some level and you want to explore if you're capable of more. So that's why Michael Jordan had a coach, ty Wood's has a coach like the best in the game have coaches.

And the original question you asked was what could someone, what could a client come into the conversation with to make the most of it? And it's actually pretty simple With your coach generally, you're going to develop a vision that's crystal clear and white hot. What do you want to do? and doesn't matter. So where do you want to be in a year or in six months? And then the coach will explore Hey, if we get that together, if we can get to that place, would it matter to you, would it matter to your marriage, would it matter to your community? Would it matter to your team? So it gives you a why behind the what. So then we come into the call with that And then the coach generally, in my practice, we invite you to get really, really Sober with your current reality.

So where are you in relationship to that big vision? So that exposes a gap. I'm here, i want to be there. I'm not there yet, and It's a great place to start for a coaching conversation because that brings up Any number of things. It brings up fear, brings up confusion, embarrassment, could bring up excitement, and then your coach generally is trained to have strategic conversations that help change your mindset around that gap.

And if we can change your mindset and the apostle Paul was right you change your thinking. You do change your life. If we can change how you think about the gap, then we open up more options available to you. So by the end of Again I'm just speaking from my practice by the end of every session, you're putting on paper a couple of strategic experiments that you want to run In the next week To see if they produce some results towards that vision. So again, you come in with a clear vision. You come in with the courage to be really honest and sober about your reality and also honest about how it feels to not be there yet. And I find that's where the good stuff is. That makes the most of coaching conversation.

0:13:38 - Rusty George
So if you're, if you're coaching somebody and they come up with, all right, here's my vision. Um, i want to play basketball for the Lakers and you're looking at them going, okay, okay, that That ain't gonna happen. So I mean, how do you, how do you define Reality? or dial that back a little bit to where all right the visions. You've overstepped it Where it's a fantasy.

0:14:07 - Joseph King Barkley
Yes, exactly. Yeah, i mean without, without taking too much time. There are there's a lot of inquiry around why that's your goal. You know you're sitting here today and you're four foot three and um, you, you know you only have one foot. You really think that you're gonna be playing for the NBA next year? Um, and you know I'm being playful, and you know I'm being playful, but it's a chance for us to talk about why that's the idea, and what happens in a fairly short amount of time is is people start to reveal Why that fantasy is.

Um, well, i don't even want to call it a fantasy, because I have found that some people come in with a dream that both of us thought, oof, okay, that's, that's a big, that's a big idea. And then, through, as a result of coaching and their own commitment, they get. They get far more than they thought they were capable of. So we want to remain open to surprise, but there are a lot of cases where we invite them to um, to get really honest about What's what seems to be in line with the way that they're built, with their opportunities in front of them, and I find that a vision that is too grandiose actually Emotionally detaches you from getting results in the short term. So if you and I were to say rusty, um, what's the goal for Real Life Church? And you're like, we want 300 churches in three months, we want to plant 300 churches in three months, you and I both would believe that'd be better for the world.

Um, but the the goal. And the goal is like man, god is big, he surprises us, he does so much more than we could ask or even imagine. So it seems like a glorifying vision. We're glorifying god by thinking that big. And yet I have found that when the vision is that big, the leader Can tend to Uh emotionally detach from the work necessary for reinvention and transformation to get there. Like, that's so huge, why even start Right? And so there's a bit of like let's put the goalpost. We kind of measure Where's the goalpost sit? That activates you. Uh, a, a vision that I find to be very functional is a is a clear picture of the future that inspires the pain of transformation. And You know, through a couple of conversations, if you've landed on something that would do that to the person, it would provide it for the person And maybe for the five foot two, one legged 63 year old man. Playing for the Lakers next season May not inspire him to the pain of transformation.

0:16:54 - Rusty George
There was a time earlier in this season I thought that would actually be an upgrade.

0:16:59 - Joseph King Barkley
Well, you're more of a sports guy than me, so I I don't even know that I would be a good coach for those clients.

0:17:05 - Rusty George
Oh, yes, okay, So let's, let's shift gears a little bit, because that's coaching. but yeah, you and I are also concerned about Spiritual transformation and a lot of our listeners on this show Are more concerned with that, and they hear personal coach, they hear executive coach and they think, okay, that sounds like a lot of self actualization, it sounds like a lot of uh, you know, um, personal aspirations that really don't lead anywhere. But From your experience, you've seen that there's something else going on here that actually a lot of the things that you used to do as a Pastor and the things you do as an executive coach kind of not only Kind of line up together, but they kind of get a person to where you wanted to go with them in the first place as a pastor. So what are you noticing that it actually takes for somebody to experience transformation?

0:17:57 - Joseph King Barkley
Yeah, i The first thing, and this applies certainly to coaching, but I think that The local church, when we're really paying attention to Jesus, is the best at providing it, and that is grace, that If people really were convinced that they could be incredibly real and not be rejected, that is going to get them Into the work of transformation faster. Um, because god is, because god is devoted to loves, is desiring to change the real you, not the fabricated you, and I found that the grace of God in my life and the grace of his people has given me the perfect environment in which to get as real as I want to get. Search me, god, know my heart, test me, know my anxious thoughts, point out the stuff in me that gets in the way and lead me to those things that last forever, and though, again, some of my clients would not necessarily yet understand that there's a God who wants that for them and wants to meet them there. That is the nature of the conversation. Let's put a vision on the board that tests you and reveals your anxious thoughts, and also reveals your selfish thoughts and your prideful thoughts, because Jesus knew what he was talking about when he said that those are the things that get in our way, and so if we need to talk about your revenue as sort of a Trojan horse to talk about the bigger conversations, then that might be a very effective way for you to start having some of those spiritually transforming conversations. But again, it takes grace to know that in this conversation, in this moment, you can be as real as you want to be and you do not risk rejection. So it's necessary for real transformation to happen.

The second one that comes to mind for me is permission, and I believe that real influence in someone's life isn't something that can be imposed on them. I mean, certainly you can abuse and you can oppress, but the most powerful kind of influence you can have in somebody's life is one that has to be given to you. I don't care what your title is, i give you permission to have influence in my life, and so it could be the first step of faith. God, i trust you. I have so many questions still, but I trust you with my future is even the God of the universe is allowing us, giving us space to say yes or no to him, and our relationships are the same. Transformation has to move at the speed of their permission.

The third one is mindset. I meant it that Paul in my experience at least, paul knew exactly what he was talking about that if we can pay attention to how we think about the world around us and people and ourselves, i think that that gives us the biggest chance to transform our lives. If we start from behavior and work our way into hoping that is going to change our thinking, sometimes it kind of works. It sparks something. It's sort of fake it until you make it mindset, but the transformation to me is deeper, more sustainable. It actually scales, if you want to use that phrase. Scales faster if it starts from just changing how you think about the world.

They just try on a different way of seeing this. I know you don't feel like God loves you and that you're worth loving to death and that you belong. But let's just try it on for just a second. What would you do if you knew that, no matter what, you weren't going to be rejected by the God who loves you? What might you try? What would you confess? Who would you reconcile with? What would you do with your money If you really believed? I think that's faith. By the way, faith is just acting as though the thing you say, you believe, is entirely true. So if we start with our mindset, i think it opens up some options for us And by choosing to give it a shot, experiment with those mindsets, we start to see real change happen. Choices create those changes in our lives. So I would say grace, permission, mindset and those are the key ingredients for real transformation to happen in our lives.

0:22:19 - Rusty George
All right, let's talk about mindset for a second, Because we all know, because there's been so much research done on this, the ruts that get drilled through our brain and neuropathways and those kind of things as far as well. I've always believed that. I was always told this, and you have to break out of those mindsets. So when you're talking about this, it's more than just an agreement. Okay, yeah, I could do this. Fine, Now it's a. I have to retrain my mind to really believe that. So is that just a lot of self-talk? Is that a lot of post-it notes on the wall, or on a mirror.

Sure, i mean, i know those are all like pieces of it, but I'm good enough, i'm smart enough.

0:23:02 - Joseph King Barkley
Dough gone of people like me Exactly.

0:23:04 - Rusty George
Exactly. I mean, is this the whole say up for 28 days and you'll finally believe it? I mean, how do you coach people to have the right mindset?

0:23:12 - Joseph King Barkley
Well, yeah, first of all, I don't start with right or wrong in terms of mindset. I just start with options And we sort of play the movie out in our mind, which I think is a Stephen Covey concept is where I heard that metaphor where, hey, play this movie out Like if we were to think about this problem, this person, this idea, through this lens. Just try it out. Let's play the movie out and see what might happen. Okay, let's try it with this lens. See what might happen, so you get to explore it. And humans are so good at this. We actually could imagine possible outcomes, so many different scenarios before we take action. And I like to start with playing from that space.

The what, if And phenomenology is really the core idea from it gets a lot of press right now. It's all about the meaning that we make of our experiences and how that might influence our behavior. It's not a new idea, even though we've batched it. We've sort of distilled it into certain kinds of studies and books and gurus lately. But Dr Martin Luther King Jr was a student of phenomenology. Gandhi was And because you can't win him also as Hitler, hitler was a student of phenomenology. It is somebody who's able to introduce new ways of seeing your circumstances that drive different behaviors. I actually think this was. This is God's idea. I think this is Jesus's idea. You think this, what if it's this? You think that, what if it's this? You think this person should be rejected? What if you think a child is somebody who doesn't qualify? What if God wants you to come to him like a child? So it's first trading what we think about the world, and then what actions might that produce? And that is where it's not just self-talk, although maybe for some people it starts there. It certainly can, but instead it's driven by your commitments. Again, to use a biblical framework is living by faith. So, okay, let's just assume for a second, even for a week, that this thing is true. What actions would you take? And that's more than post-it notes and talking to yourself in a mirror.

I am so scared that I was talking with a client two weeks ago and she was asking what if there is no purpose for my life? And I said what would you try this week if you were convinced there was? And we came up with a list of commitments. She had three that came out of that session and then we checked in. I said. After she kept those commitments, we checked in the next week. I asked hey, what changed in your life? And she reported feeling a sense of confidence, of direction, of hope. There's so much more to go with that conversation, but so often it was I'm just going to step out of this boat And I don't know much. But I know that I'm going towards this guy, or I know I'm going towards this vision, or I know I'm going towards this purpose. So it is a lot more than self-talk. It's choosing actions that may produce different results based on a different way of thinking.

0:26:37 - Rusty George
So just getting the posters on the wall about attitude and those kind of things isn't enough, is it?

0:26:47 - Joseph King Barkley
No, i don't have any posters on my wall, not if that.

0:26:52 - Rusty George
Attitude determines altitude, or something like that.

0:26:54 - Joseph King Barkley
Exactly. I mean, hey, those might be good props. I mean, people put Bible verses all over the place and doesn't mean you believe it Might just be a reminder of something that you want to remember at times when you tend to forget.

0:27:07 - Rusty George
It really is. Yeah, i mean, hobby Lobby's made a mint off of that. We like these positive verses on the wall, so why?

0:27:14 - Joseph King Barkley
not Absolutely. You pray love. I forgot to do all three of those today. That's right, that's right?

0:27:19 - Rusty George
Well, we mainly eat, Okay. so you have created this institute called the Metaproformance Institute. What in the world is this?

0:27:32 - Joseph King Barkley
Well, for the record, I didn't create it. I was recently invited to serve as its president.

0:27:38 - Rusty George
Hey, let me interrupt for just a second. If you're a church leader and your church does not have an app or your app seems to be a little bit limited, check out subsplashcom as a great resource to really give your app all the horsepower that it needs. You can connect people, you can help them get access to messages and you can help them set up recurring giving, which is a game changer when it comes to resourcing your ministry subsplashcom Okay, back to our episode.

0:28:07 - Joseph King Barkley
Well, for the record, i didn't create it. I was recently invited to serve as its president. Okay, the Metaproformance Institute is a branch of Novus Global, which is a global coaching firm, and the Metaproformance Institute. The bottom line is we generally train and certify people to do what I do to be coaches, and there's a few different branches of that. We can train executives or leaders of nonprofits, local churches, businesses, small and large, to use coaching ideas and principles to do leadership development. So that's a way that we serve people. We certainly have a. There's a five month program we call Foundations, which certifies someone to be an ontological coach, which is how I serve. But we're also developing programs to help people be trainers, like in a room, like if you're leading a seminar or you're trying to do it like a breakout session at your business or a church or a conference. How do you lead a room to participate in an idea? And then we do it. There's a keynote speaking intensive that we're developing and rolling out in the next few months for people who want to raise their game as public communicators, whether they do that professionally or not, and all of this is under the umbrella of Metaproformance And it's really a term that we've coined to describe something that a lot of us have either experienced or admired.

It started from the question of what goes beyond high performance. Rusty, you and I have talked about before. Like, i'm a high performance guy, you're a high performance guy, i like being around high performance people, but a few years ago that landed me in the hospital. I was burned in the candle at both ends and I had near adrenal shutdown. And on a date night with my wife, i passed out And it was just based on working 100 hours a week, planting a church and not asking for help. Yep, that's a high performance mindset. And we started to ask what's beyond that, what's better than that? And so, again, we've collected principles that help people get a whole lot more done in less time, with increased joy and help and satisfaction, and we call that Metaproformance.

The simplest way that I help people understand it is to explain the different questions that levels of performers are trying to ask. There's areas of my life where I'm a low performer and I'm asking what's the bare minimum I can do? So like doing the dishes. I'm a low performer, i really don't care about being a high performer and doing the dishes. Then there are performers, which is how good is good enough, and that's great. There's areas of my life where I just want to make sure it's good enough, like it's satisfactory. I want to be a performer when it comes to doing my taxes. I want to make sure it's legal, i'm doing good enough, but I'm not going to be an accountant, right? That's not my vision.

Then it moves into high performance, and high performance is how do I win? Or maybe how do I be the best? How do I get the trophy? And That has that there's a summit to that peak, because once you're the best, then what you're trying to do is maintain that status, even subconsciously.

Metapreformance changes the question completely and it's an ongoing orientation towards life that asks what are we capable of? So it introduces the community aspect that you are surrounded by people who, together, get to continually explore what they're capable of, and I love that for so many different reasons. Not only do we succeed together, but it calls to mind how the world is impacted as we succeed. It's a question I can always ask, no matter how high I am in a certain, you know, ability or status or achievement. Hey, let's ask again What are we capable of together? What could we be capable of this next year together, and So under that framework is how we train people to be leaders.

Okay, so this and the meta. I should say this sorry, interrupt you there, the meta part, because I get asked this a lot That seems like meta, like the question behind the question, like it's abstract. We mean meta in terms of transformation, select metamorphosis, so it's the kind of performance that is constantly inviting us into renovation and reinvention and transformation. We're becoming something else as We move towards what we're capable of and this involves you working for Mark Zuckerberg.

0:32:51 - Rusty George
It can, if I put a word in for you.

0:32:56 - Joseph King Barkley
Yeah, if you could, although if he becomes aware of us I, we might be subject to a lawsuit.

0:33:02 - Rusty George
now that I think about it, i Don't think he's listening to this podcast, yeah, okay, so we You know, from the church perspective, it sounds, boy, it sounds like you're using a lot of really Fancy corporate language to describe what we've been trying to articulate for 2,000 years. Sure of you know communal, faith-based, grace-giving, permission giving, faith-oriented type of living. I mean, what are the ways? because you know you're still a part of the church, even though you're not a pastor of a church, you're still a Christian. Oh, yeah, what are? what are the ways involved in local church? Yeah, exactly. What are the ways that the church gets it right? What are the ways that the church misses it when it comes to this idea of really helping somebody discover this?

0:33:59 - Joseph King Barkley
I Think the world outside the church has so much to learn from things that to us seem kind of Second nature. Yeah, the fact that we care about mindset first You know I quoted new and old testament just now. I mean, god has been telling us this Cover to cover Your brain is so powerful to Create change in your life and in others lives. So mindset, the fact that we focus there, the fact that we care about what is timeless more than what is novel. We want things that have always worked, not just new fancy ideas Although we're open to new ideas and let's adapt timeless ideas into timely strategies The fact that we care much more about timeless, eternal principles. I think there's a lot of distraction and waste created when businesses have to come up with the new Version, the new way to do something. Yeah, when maybe basic principles that have always worked would still work.

Another thing the church does in our sleep is community. I think if your vision could be accomplished by yourself, your vision is too small. Yeah, and the church from day one of a church plan you know, i both have been there is what It's a we. We are in this together. This is what we are headed towards, what God has called us to do. Another one that I've appreciated more and more As I've continued to be involved in the local church is how diverse the church is and it gets. There is certainly so much growth To do, and I still agree that in some ways Sunday morning might be the most segregated hour of our week, but the the more that I'm experiencing the local church and I've been all over the world and gotten to serve in different contexts There is an increasing amount of ethnic diversity happening more to come for sure But I do think that the local Christian church, generally speaking, is still better at ethnic diversity than almost any other institution or industry. But it's also it goes beyond that. I also think that you are choosing to be in community with people that otherwise you would not choose to be in community with people of different ages, yeah, socioeconomic backgrounds, mental abilities. You have so many chances, week after week, to expand your experience because you're choosing to be exposed to people aren't like you, but you're just so good at that.

And then the last thing that comes to mind for me is purpose. Like we, we eat purpose for breakfast. We plan every meeting with a purpose. I've often said that nothing unites us faster than a common enemy. But nothing unites us deeper than a common purpose, and We have definitely picked our enemies. I think there's a repentance and a reconciliation that would be healthy for us to continue to do as a church, that the world outside these walls is not the enemy. So, rather than unite us around some common opponent, is To return back to a common purpose that we are to go and Make disciples of all the nations and baptize them in the name of the Father, son, the Holy Spirit. Nothing will unite us deeper than that in a purpose bigger than ourselves.

So I think those are things the church does. When we remember those things, we do better than anybody else in the world.

0:37:22 - Rusty George
That's so good, okay, so Let's dig a little deeper into how the church can Get better, because there's a lot of things they do right, sure, and I would agree with everything you just said. But I think the, you know, the combination lock that every church has been trying to unlock Since the beginning of their time has been how do we disciple people? and For as long as I've been around church and I'm sure you would say the same it has been a pendulum swing between knowledge or service. You know we either got us, we got to study more, or we got to do more. And you know Jesus said you know, you hear the word of God and put it into practice, and it seems like we all gravitate to one or the other. What you're talking about is a combination of both. With this idea of transformation, what could we do better? How could we think about discipleship better when we look at it through this lens of The things that make transformation a reality?

0:38:26 - Joseph King Barkley
hmm, yeah, i think a lot about this every week, i do, and I think that two words that I hope are encouraging to those listening who really care about this is simple and understandable. And if we put everything we do through the lens of simple and understandable which I love the title of your podcast and I love your podcast But, wow, what is the simplest thing that we can do and how do we become as understandable as possible? Otherwise we are complicated and ineffective. Yeah, and it's not a church thing, by the way, it's a human thing. Yep, you know how many buttons do we need to add to the remote on the television, just because the engineers just have our board and need to add more features? Real quick, i'll give you a few things just from my experience, and I'm gonna overstate these.

I've certainly seen churches that That I could learn so much from in this, but there's this is a chance for all of us just to revisit these ideas. I think we disguise good news behind bad language. That's the phrase I use, and I don't mean like we cuss all the time, i just mean how dare we hide the biggest answers to life's biggest questions behind confusing language? Yeah, and that's a great ongoing discipline to keep revisiting how we talk about big ideas in a way that everybody understands. I think another thing is that when we make it about education and not about mindset, Hey, make sure you can check all these boxes of vocabulary, words or statements. I'm not saying those things are unimportant, but if we haven't started with how you want to, or choose to, think about the world, then being able to pass a test of Data is not transformation. So there may be somebody experiencing a ton of transformation, but they wouldn't necessarily check all of our boxes theologically quite yet, mm-hmm. So when we make it about you have to call, get an A before your, you are allowed to engage in transformation. Here is a way we make it. We set up barriers And then I'm not 100% on this rusty, but I have revisited the idea of how many topics we try to cover over the course of the calendar year or year over year.

I wonder. So this is not a fully formed thought, so I'm not even sure I'm totally bought into it yet, but I wonder if there's an opportunity to go deeper on fewer sets of topics every year, rather than feel like we have to cover everything over the course of a teaching calendar, for instance in two or three years, and then the customization can happen in smaller contexts, like a summer special seminar that we're doing around this particular issue, but where, from the stage, we're covering what? if it's the same six basic Kingdom principles every year and we just keep running that play, i think it would create some simplicity and possibly some depth, but again, i'm not totally convinced of that idea. It's just that's more of. That was a little more wet cement for me. I could keep going. You want me to keep going?

0:41:37 - Rusty George
Well, i want to drill down on that because I'm curious about what these six might be, because I think you're onto something there. I mean, for everybody who's planning a message calendar, you're thinking, okay, now, this series will make this group of people happy, this series will make this group of people happy. So we got to do a book study because if I don't, i'll be confused with being real light church. So I need to offer some depth here. Oh, and this is the time of year, no one's here, so this is when I should probably do this series. So what would you drill down on? What are the three or four topics you'd go? man, we got to hit this every single year.

0:42:17 - Joseph King Barkley
Yeah, the first place I go honestly is a sermon on the.

0:42:20 - Rusty George
Mount.

0:42:22 - Joseph King Barkley
And I'm not saying that's what Jesus was prescribing, that these are the only things we talk about, clearly not because he expanded beyond that. But I would go there to say, okay, he covered our romantic lives, he covered our money, he covered service, do good, so they would glorify your Father who's in heaven. And so I would wonder if a 30,000 foot study of the sermon on the Mount would help us uncover basic concepts that if we were to teach those, and in new ways I'm not saying just you have the same sermons every year, but the same concepts every year I mean that is a picture of what it means to live life as God knows it. That's what Jesus called the kingdom, like that was it.

That was Jesus telling us. This is what it's like to live life as God knows it, and so I'm not sure that's six. It'd be more than six topics as I think about it now. But yeah, that might be a place to start. It'd be interesting to do a comparison between that and the Ten Commandments, because there's a ton of overlap in that, and that would I think that those might be interesting handles to draw from. I like that I don't know, it might even be a worthwhile experiment is for two or three years to just run those plays And then again to offer people more contextualized conversations off of the platform, and churches can do that in all kinds of ways. It's an Ask the Pastor afternoon luncheon. It's a special video series that we post online around different topics. It's, you know, depending on the context, there's a lot of ways that we can provide people more specialized messages for what they're going through. That's so good.

0:44:16 - Rusty George
Yeah, it's always been the weight that I've felt And I know you felt it as well where people want you to deal with every issue in their life And they also want it in one hour And they want it, and they want it once every six weeks when they finally show up And it's this unbearable weight that you can't ever seem to catch up with And then they end up leaving because they're not being fed And you're like are you kidding me? I mean, you haven't come to the table. You know I'm serving it up, you're just not here.

0:44:54 - Joseph King Barkley
Or I mean, i got this so often. So often someone would show up and say why doesn't this church ever talk about blank? And you say we did four weeks ago. It's just that you just got here.

0:45:03 - Rusty George
Exactly, yeah, i totally agree. Yeah, okay. so you deal with a lot of executive level people that are looking for coaching. See, you know, c-suite people, people that are running companies, athletes, actors, people dealing with various stages of life that are highly successful. Oftentimes in the church, we're kind of freaked out by these people. a pastor is okay, because you meet somebody in the lobby and they say, well, i'm a CEO of a Fortune 100 company And you're like, oh man, i better dress up or I better get my act together or use big words or whatever it is. So you know, there's a part of us that thinks, well, you don't want to hear from me, or I got nothing to offer you, or I can't ask you to work in the nursery. So you know, what is it that we miss out on that? you've learned now that you're on the other side of the desk, so to speak.

0:46:00 - Joseph King Barkley
I get that feeling for sure, and I would say the first thing that just comes to mind, rusty, honestly, is that mindset. no surprise, i'm going to start with mindset, that mindset of the leader, to begin with, because, my goodness, we're not standing there in our authority. we get to wear the jersey of the kingdom of God.

And so what we get to communicate and how we love people and what we get to tell them about real life is something they desperately need.

So it might help to, as you're thinking about interacting with people of all kinds of status and education, that you're not standing there in the authority of your education or the authority of how articulate you are, or the authority of your experience. If so, then you're only going to get to talk to people like you and none of you are going to change very fast. So that's the first thing I would encourage us with But a few other things that I've noticed that the church has a great opportunity here to create some bridges. The first one is excellence. I don't mean expensive, i don't mean elaborate, i just mean whatever we're doing to do it to the best of our ability, because to generally speaking, to corporate leaders I interact with, that communicates value. That means you mattered enough or this message mattered enough to us to do it to the best of our ability, and I'll often tell leaders that, like a typo on the screen for the worship song is intuitively telling somebody in the room what we're doing with the bookkeeping. So paying attention to excellence does matter a ton. The other one is that they, generally speaking, are looking for courage more than comfort. That doesn't mean they're not in pain or they're not in crisis, and I think to continue to be comforting is crucial.

But I was talking with an executive last week at Pixar after the SBB I don't know when this podcast will air, but this is just weeks after the Silicon Valley Bank crisis and shutdown and they were in panic mode And I started to go into a comforting posture and the executive said to me I need to know where to find courage right now. I don't need to be comforted. So they wanted to see it modeled. They wanted to find what other leader they could look up to. They had people whose jobs were not necessarily on the line, but they were influencing a group of people, and so they're looking somewhere and doesn't have to always happen from the stage of the platform, but they are looking for models of being strong and very courageous in all circumstances And we get to do that if we want to, and that might be helpful.

Another thing, tactically speaking, is, generally they're not going to be the first ones to join a small group, and I don't mean they never will, but To the degree that you want to. I would encourage your leaders to carve out some time every month to meet with. It. Could just be one or two men or women in their context who are leaders, entrepreneurs, and Sit down and talk about what's really going on in their lives. Yeah, that, yeah, that'll be an opportunity, before we were waiting for them to kind of join our program. Yeah, yeah, does that resonate with some of your experience?

0:49:35 - Rusty George
Absolutely. I mean I would. I was crazy in the early days to think that Whatever engagement funnel we put together worked for 100% of the people You know. I mean it works for a majority, but a lot of them. Look at me and go listen. I'm not going to go sit in a stranger's living room with a book in my lap and talk about my feelings, Okay, but I would. I would take you to lunch and ask you how I should deal with this situation. In my office I said let's do that then. So you're earning chips right there that One day get them to. You know, take a risk somewhere else and and a lot of it is a Lot of it is kind of tailor-made Mm-hmm.

0:50:22 - Joseph King Barkley
Yeah, and it's not an entitlement thing, Although certainly people you know they'll have their entitlements, But so does everybody sure it's not just your executives right. But? but that might be a way of meeting them at their well. Before we demand they come to our temple, meet them at their place of business.

0:50:38 - Rusty George
Did you just make that up? Because that's just bro. How are you dropping these nuggets? I'm just typing away here.

0:50:45 - Joseph King Barkley
I just miss preaching so much, man, it's all like it's pent up.

0:50:50 - Rusty George
Man, that's so good. Okay, so do you miss preaching? do you miss being a pastor?

0:50:58 - Joseph King Barkley
I do, you know I'll. I'll say I I miss my church. Radius was something special, yeah, and I'm grateful that the people of radius Again, not a hundred percent, but many of them have found their ways into their next great church Mm-hmm, but we man. It was powerful to be part of what God was doing in that community. I think every local church is just a temporary outpost of an eternal kingdom. So I didn't have delusions that radius was gonna be the one church that lasted forever, but I loved getting to be a part of that and I miss that church.

I missed working. I miss working with my team. I'm still very close with most of them And I'm really proud of what they're up to now, but I loved creating together, especially during COVID. That was one of the good things about COVID was getting to experiment with Really brave, creative, courageous people. My team was incredible And I miss rusty. This is a. This is a big one that gets it's pretty moving to think about, but I miss being Getting to host the biggest moments of people's lives as often. I know that there'll be more of that to come, but to be there for people's first steps of faith and for the baptisms and weddings and funerals and Reconciliations and surrender and breaking of addictions is yeah that is it's such a Incredible privilege.

Yeah, and I miss, i miss that being a typical Sunday, yeah, so, yeah, yeah, i do miss it.

0:52:35 - Rusty George
It's that weird dynamic where you know you get this spiritual High while physically you're exhausted. You know, and it's that son. You know what I mean.

0:52:46 - Joseph King Barkley
It's that.

0:52:47 - Rusty George
Sunday afternoon of. I'm so physically tired But I cannot sleep because I'm so spiritually, you know, rentalized, you know I just I don't even know if that's a word, but that it's just this incredible feeling of what God does through you in that moment, that It's. It's unlike anything else.

0:53:09 - Joseph King Barkley
So there's nothing like it, no Profound respect for, for pastors and the, the burden that it is, you know, outside the church, leadership is a ladder You climb. inside the church is an increased burden that you bear.

I didn't just make that up, that's something I've said for a long time, and so there's a huge, enormous burden. Yeah, to being a pastor. that's unlike any other leadership position, but the The privilege of getting to be there when God does some of those things. Again, i know I'll get to be a part of many more of those to come. I'm excited about that as a part of the local church, but being kind of the first phone call or being the front line of that, the way that you get to be when you're in full-time ministry, is something I miss deeply, yeah, so thanks for asking my buddy and mentor, mike bro, likes to say what other job Do you have?

0:54:00 - Rusty George
people walk up to you and say you changed my life. You know, it's just. It's a very humbling kind of thing, and you and I both know it's not us. We truly are where, as you said, we're wearing the jersey for the kingdom, but to be a part of that is, it's a real gift. So how can people find out more about what you're doing? Maybe contact you, maybe even ask you about being their coach? Where can they find you?

0:54:26 - Joseph King Barkley
Yeah, easy to find me online Joseph King Barclay comm, and that's a portal to everything that we're up to, joseph King Barclay comm, and would love to interact and help anybody who, yeah, has some more questions about what we're up to.

0:54:41 - Rusty George
Yeah, well, that'd be great. Man, every time I talk with you whether it's at lunch or, you know, over some of the most funny experiences I've ever had in ministry, at a table with other pastors Or on a podcast. Man, i learned so much. Thank you, buddy. I really appreciate you being on the show and I can't wait to listen back to this, because you just dropped some incredible wisdom on us today.

0:55:05 - Joseph King Barkley
Thank you, Rusty Love you, buddy.

0:55:08 - Rusty George
Well, i'm grateful for Joseph and his content. He always gives us his friendship, his encouragement in my life. I think you're gonna really want to follow him more closely and you're gonna want to share this episode with somebody else. So make sure you pass it on and ask them to hit subscribe as well. And when you hit subscribe, you not only get all the episodes of simple faith, but you're gonna get our once a month episode of leading simple as well. So make sure you join us for that, and next week we'll be back with wow. This one's gonna be different.

I recently completed 20 years of service at Real Life Church and the people that helped make this podcast happen said What if we interview you and ask you what you've learned over 20 years in leading real life? And I said okay. And Michael Hinton, one of our favorite teachers here at real life and now the new lead pastor at Summit Church, went ahead and interviewed me over the course of oh, probably an hour, asked me a bunch of questions that Really dove deep into what's happened here at real life over the last 20 years. We had a lot of fun. I hope you learned something from it, and that's coming up next week, as always. Thanks for listening and I hope you have a great, great week and, as always, keep it simple.