The Rusty George Podcast

0:00:01 - Rusty George
Erin, thank you so much for joining the podcast. For our listeners who don't know you, tell us a little bit about yourself.

0:00:08 - Erin Johnston
Yeah, my name is Erin Johnston. I'm currently the co-executive pastor at Canyon Ridge Christian Church in Las Vegas, but I am born and raised actually in Boise, idaho, so I'm an Idaho girl at heart, but now a transplant to Vegas.

0:00:26 - Rusty George
And I can tell that you're from there because you know how to say Boise, yeah, boise, boise correct, that's right. So, while everybody else is moving to Idaho, you have left the state and here you are in Vegas. So what brought you to Vegas?

0:00:41 - Erin Johnston
Yeah, actually a job at Canyon Ridge brought me here in 2019. Actually, just a few months before the pandemic, I took a job down here actually to be the high school pastor and was in Vegas for about four months before a pandemic hit.

0:00:57 - Rusty George
Wow.

0:00:58 - Erin Johnston
Just super helpful. New city, new job and a global pandemic on top of it.

0:01:04 - Rusty George
Well, I know that we've had your senior pastor, drew Moore, on the show before and we've talked about you guys have gone through kind of a paradigm shift and where I mean, every church's mission statement is the same go and make disciples. But we all try to kind of go at it from different angles and you guys made a major shift in how you do that, and I'd love for you to talk to us a little bit about that journey. And here's why I ask because all of us who are Christ followers are tasked to make disciples, but we just typically assume that's the church's role and so we at best invite someone to church and expect the pastor to do it. You guys have empowered people to do it. Tell us a little bit about what you're doing, and has that always been your style, or did you need some convincing along the way?

0:01:53 - Erin Johnston
Yeah, well, we set out a couple years ago. We decided we want to spark a movement of disciple makers with too many generations to count in the city of Las Vegas and beyond. And so in order to do that, we said, we have to kind of, like you already said, empower each individual to show up wherever they are in their places of influence. We call it their faces and places. Who are the faces they see in the places that they go and show up with all that? They need to be equipped to make disciples who make disciples. And so, like you said, we had to shift our model completely of, instead of you, come here to our church and we will make your friends and your family members disciple makers. You are, like, best positioned, wherever you are, to show up in the lives of people that you already do life with and make disciples of those people.

And so, for me, when I moved to Vegas to take this job, I had a little bit of like dissatisfaction in me about how I was seeing and experiencing churches making disciples. Like I knew, we talked about discipleship and I knew we were doing a good job with the people that we already had coming in our doors, but those that were far from God or had no really even knowledge of Jesus, I was like I'm not sure that we're doing a great job of reaching those people. And so when our lead pastor, drew, kind of told us I think this is the direction that we need to go, I was like okay, I have no idea what that looks like, that feels incredibly ambiguous, but let's go. And so it's been a really cool journey of really just kind of exploring and discovering along the way. There hasn't been a clear map for us to follow, we've just been kind of exploring along the way.

0:03:40 - Rusty George
You live in Vegas, obviously, which is a, you know, one of the entertainment capitals of the world. You have churches in Vegas that put on incredible attractional weekends and no knock on that, that's their style. You guys decide to shift gears and kind of become a little bit more focus on building up the believer to go out and make disciples. Did you find pushback from other Christ followers, other churches, even people within the church on this?

0:04:13 - Erin Johnston
Oh yeah, I mean lots of pushback. It was hard, it cost us a lot and I don't mean money, I mean relational investment, time and a lot of people going. You guys seem crazy. But what's been cool is, as we've done this and just been faithful to what we feel like God has called us to do, we've started to see some of those people that were originally kind of skeptical or even cynical of this vision kind of come back around and say, huh, something really cool is happening here and we just had to decide early on we're just gonna be who we are.

Yeah, there's a lot of churches doing a lot of stuff and, like you said, no condemnation, that is them and we just celebrate anybody making followers of Jesus. And so we just decided we're gonna be us and we're not gonna apologize for that. And there have been moments where it would have been easier to not be us, you know. But we have said this is who we are, this is who we believe God's calling us to become, and we're not gonna apologize for that. We're gonna kind of firmly invite people to join us along the way.

0:05:21 - Rusty George
Okay, so let's get really granular on this. If I'm a Christ follower that attends Canyon Ridge, what are you asking of me, what are you expecting from me, and how are you preparing me to do that?

0:05:36 - Erin Johnston
Absolutely so. A few things we talk about a lot around here is that we wanna work on the soil. So we're trying to ask the question what does our soil need to look like? I mean, even Jesus talks about the soil of our heart. But then what does the soil of our organization look like? What kind of culture are we building and inviting people to participate in that actually supports a disciple, making movement, as we call it?

And so there's a few things that are just pretty crucial or we have found are just necessary, and one of those is that we just continuously say from 1 Peter 2,9 that every believer's a priest, that we just call every person to bring their fullest contribution. Contribution is not limited to only staff members or only pastors, but we just believe every believer's a priest and we wanna just unleash every believer to like live in the fullness of their contribution, whatever that looks like. And then we also just really ask people and try to train people in great listening and powerful questions. We just believe that an organization is only as powerful or as strong or as even equipped as the questions that they ask. And so we just try to embody that and we try to help our people be curious, not just people that have a lot of knowledge to tell others, but really curious presence.

And then we're just trying to build awareness, like For so many people.

We discover that they have lots of people that are close to them but far from God, but they've never really thought about it that way, and so we regularly do exercises to just help people kind of map in their lives who is close to me but far from God and who are my faces in my places. And then I would say one more piece that's just really important to us is we're just inviting every single person in our church into. We call it extraordinary prayer, like prayer that matters for something, praying deeply for our faces and places, praying that God would spark a movement in us and around us, praying for opportunities in the city of Las Vegas and beyond. And so we have just found along the way rather than talk about those things, we're trying to embody those things, and so it's all about the soil. So we just think people are starting to get a sense of like huh, we're just doing things differently. Those have been around for a long time and those that are new are just kind of jumping in with us. So it's been cool.

0:08:00 - Rusty George
So give me a couple success stories of people in your church that have caught this idea and then begin to invest in tilling the soil or planting in the soil of their faces and places. I mean, does it start with you know, I've identified somebody and I've started praying for them, and then God presented an opportunity or is there some education in place? To use old school language, you equip them with the four spiritual laws and a nice tract and they're ready to roll, or how does that look?

0:08:32 - Erin Johnston
Yeah, so we have a kind of our new person class. We call it Discover Kenan Ridge and you know, when people show up to a church they want to know about that church, they want to know about that place if that's going to become their place and their people. And so we've tried to kind of adapt that gathering that we offer every single month to be a training ground for disciple makers.

0:08:52 - Rusty George
Okay.

0:08:53 - Erin Johnston
And so we offer a couple simple tools that help people grow in their awareness. We use a model called the Four Fields, which is based out of Mark, the book of Mark, in Acts, chapter two, when it talks about a healthy church, and at the end of that Acts chapter two passage it says the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved. And so we try to use that as a model to equip people to kind of look around them and say, okay, how am I doing? You know in this, and to take those simple tools with them wherever they go. So, yeah, we're trying to use simple, simple, simple tools we use, you know I've talked about the faces and places. We use another tool called our relational map. So we just map our faces and our places. We use a tool called our transformation story, like who was I before Jesus and who is Jesus helping me to become, and ending that simple story with a question of do you have a story like that?

To just peak people's interest in spiritual conversation.

0:09:51 - Rusty George
So what does the weekend look like now? You know, just thinking back to the way that a lot of us grew up, in the last 20 years it's been, you know. There's a cover song, there's a exciting welcome, a creative video, high powered worship, an engaging message and maybe a decision opportunity at the end. What's the weekend at Canyon Ridge look like now?

0:10:15 - Erin Johnston
Yeah, I mean, in many ways it looks similar to what it used to look like. We still sing together, we still have a teaching time together.

We still take communion together, all of those things we practice generosity together. But I would say all of it behind the scenes is built with as much intentionality as possible in the direction of disciple making and like increasing agency among those that are in our services so that they feel equipped. So we push really hard on like action steps that people can take, you know, and we talk often about costly obedience, like how are we going to be people who obey what Jesus has said? And then everything we do we try to make it simple and repeatable so that people can hand it to others, who hand it to others.

So any kind of application or next step in our teaching and we often say we want to teach to create hunger, not satisfaction, and so any kind of next step is meant to be repeatable- Okay, walk me through that.

0:11:22 - Rusty George
You teach to create hunger, not satisfaction. What's that look like?

0:11:27 - Erin Johnston
Yeah, how do we peak people's curiosity so that they might want to discover more from the scripture instead of just teaching so that they go okay, sounds good and don't feel any need to do any exploring or discovery on their own? So we just try to think through that, that strategically, and how we teach. How can we peak people's curiosity in such a way that they would have to invite someone else to discover from the scripture alongside them, to really like, understand or embody the fullness of what we're trying to communicate?

0:12:01 - Rusty George
Okay, now I know with your staff role, you work a lot with staff, obviously, and part of that is not just HR stuff and organizational metrics, but a lot of it's helping them become disciple makers as well. So what have you guys done on staff to make it a disciple-making culture and how have you seen that kind of play out over the years?

0:12:22 - Erin Johnston
Totally. We kind of committed early on, if this is gonna be true of us, that we're gonna be a disciple-making culture, we have to build conviction, not just compliance. Like we can't just have compliance towards okay, fine, I'll make disciples or I'll be a part of a church that makes disciples, but we need to build conviction. And the path to building conviction and building compliance are two very different paths, and so this has been kind of a slow burn for us. But what we realized early on is there is no substitute for you yourself and each individual on your staff making disciples on their own. Like we cannot just program this, we cannot just make this something that the church does or something that we expect our people to do. This has to be a practice that every single person on our team is embodying, and so because of that, we do the same things that I talked about in our Discover Canyon Ridge class of kind of simple tools that we try to equip people with. We're doing those things with our staff regularly. So we're regularly checking in on our staff.

How's your faces and places? What movement are you seeing in your faces and places? What spiritual conversations are you having? Who's new in your life that is close to you but far from God, and then just regularly praying together as a staff. And so I think first, when we started to make this shift, people thought, oh okay, this will, this will just be something that we focus on for a while, and then, you know, we'll move on to the next thing. And it's like here we are three years later. This is not going away. This is who we are, and we want to be people who teach others from our experience, not just our knowledge.

0:14:06 - Rusty George
Wow, that is so good. I imagine when you interact with people, and maybe even in your own life, you notice that we tend to lean one way or the other. We either want to focus on our own discipleship or focus on others evangelism. How have you found a balance with this? Do you sense a tug, you know, kind of this tug of war thing with your staff, or even in your own heart, because, like you said, there's a lot of momentum at the beginning? How do you sustain that and make it balanced?

0:14:39 - Erin Johnston
Yeah, so one of the things we set out early on to do is to think about these kind of tensions that we navigate at. We call it polarity management, which is an old leadership framework that often things that we think are problems to be solved, they're actually tensions to be managed, and this is one of those tensions. Do I be a disciple or do I make disciples?

Well, yes, yeah the answer is we want the best of both, and so we set out early on to try to figure out how do we manage polarities around us and in us, and so this is one of those. One of the things we have discovered along the way is we only really know something so we can learn something about Jesus and being his disciple, but we only really deeply know something when we've had to teach someone else that thing.

Yeah like we can think we know it, but until we've had to hand it away or give it away, that takes our knowledge to a whole other level. And so, yes, we should be people who learn and who follow Jesus deeply, while also giving it away to others. And so to me it's. I've learned and this has not come easy along the way because I have felt this tension but learning that these things are interdependent on one another. We don't do one and then do the other, but we do them kind of together at the same time, and one of those things that we do that, I think, really models this well. In our groups we use the discovery Bible study method, and so we discover from the scripture together. We are being disciples. But then an element of that study is who are you going to teach, who are you going to invite into a spiritual conversation? So it tries to kind of model the best of being and making in one format.

0:16:27 - Rusty George
I've just got to ask this because I hear that you have talked about this a lot, not just disciple making, but also being a female leader. You're an executive pastor at a very large church, a young female, and I'm sure with that comes some challenges, but also some opportunities to inspire other females as well. As a dad of two daughters, one of which who would love to work in a church someday. What encouragement would you give them?

0:16:56 - Erin Johnston
Absolutely. The thing is, whenever I talk to especially young women that are aspiring to be in leadership or are in leadership, I just always try to first of all encourage deeply that the church needs female voices. But the church does not only need female voices. Again, back to what I was just talking about. We need the best of both. We need the best of men and women together, and so I always just ask females in leadership like what is your best contribution? Not the contribution that you feel like you're supposed to make, but the contribution that that you sense. This is what my God-given contribution, this is what I'm supposed to do and what I sense deeply that God has called me to do, and then be faithful to that. It's not about a role, it's not about a title. It's what do you sense that God has called you and is inviting you to do, and then, who can support you in that?

Who are the people in your life that champion you, that see you for all of who you are good, bad, ugly and are gonna champion you no matter what the situation around you holds. I just think in this day and age, being a woman in ministry for me, I try not to just think about what do I want to do or who do I want to become, but also considering like any leadership opportunity I get is not just for me or about me. It's about making space for other women next to me and coming behind me and so trying to zoom out and see that the bigger, fuller picture is just really important, like what is faithfully enduring as a woman in ministry. Look like for you and what's your best contribution to that that's so good.

0:18:42 - Rusty George
Well, these are some great nuggets for our listeners, but you know, I always want to ask a guess. This you know, because the podcast is called Simple Faith. So I love the fact that you talked about disciple making, even leadership in terms of the simplest way to do it, a simple question, those kind of things For all of our listeners that are thinking, oh, this disciple making thing is such a huge deal, I don't know enough. What if they ask me a question? I don't understand, I'm not there yet. I feel like I'm, you know, in Pop Warner football and this is the NFL. What am I supposed to do next? Give us something that makes that would make disciple making a lot easier, maybe one step, something practical somebody could do today.

0:19:27 - Erin Johnston
Yeah, I would start with just your yourself.

0:19:30 - Rusty George
Okay.

0:19:31 - Erin Johnston
Look at, cross your life and just ask the question who is close to me but far from God? And just start making a list of those names and committing to pray a few times a week for those names. I think we would all be amazed at what God might do if we prayed intentionally for the people that are close to us but far from him, and then I think he will. He will give opportunities for spiritual conversations and other things to come downhill from that. But I think we just start by building awareness and praying deeply for those that we love.

0:20:02 - Rusty George
That's so good and we think that seems too easy. You know that seems too simple. That should be something a little bit more strategic, or I should be camped outside their door or something like that. But I find you're exactly right, because when you start doing that, then you're thinking about them all the time, you're looking for opportunities to have conversation with them and the Holy Spirit's moving ahead of you in that as well, which always tills the soil quite a bit more.

0:20:25 - Erin Johnston
Absolutely yeah.

0:20:26 - Rusty George
Well, Erin, this has been great. I really appreciate your helping out our listeners and myself today. I've looked at your church a lot and learned a lot from what you guys are doing and what Drew is doing and he's one of my favorite podcast guests and I'm so grateful for your church and all the things that you guys are doing to advance the kingdom and we're all learning from you, so keep up the great work, thank you.

0:20:48 - Erin Johnston
Awesome. Thank you so much, Rusty.