In a shorter episode of the Shock Absorber podcast, Stu and Joel dive into a range of insightful questions about how Soul Revival approaches ministry. They explore the dynamics of different congregation sizes, discuss the language used to describe them, and the importance of targeting your base effectively before expanding.
They also chat about Stu's 13 years of church planting experience, reflecting on the pitfalls they've encountered, including the challenges of balancing tradition with modern cultural adaptation. The conversation touches on the use of the Bible as a grounding reference point and the lessons learned from trying to launch multiple gatherings simultaneously. They also emphasise the value of iterative design, where setbacks are seen as learning opportunities rather than failures, and the difficulty in knowing when to persist or pivot.
00:00 Intro
00:58 CULTURAL ARTEFACT: U.S. National Conventions
06:23 Sizes of congregations
11:00 The pitfalls of church planting over the last 13 years
DISCUSSED ON THIS EPISODE
The West Wing
CONTACT US
Shock Absorber Email: joel@shockabsorber.com.au
Shock Absorber Website: shockabsorber.com.au
Soul Revival Shop: soulrevival.shop
Check out what else Soul Revival is up to here
(upbeat music) - Welcome back everyone to the short resort podcast and it is excellent to have you along with us. My name is Joel and here we are talking about many things related to church, everything related to Christianity and I've got senior pastor of Solrivable Church. Do you welcome? - G'day. - How are you? - I'm really good, how are you? - Good, I was about to, I just, almost commented on your clothes again and I'm like, I stopped. It's kind of a thing. - I like the green color. - Do you like the green? - You call that an over shirt? I don't know what you call that. Is it a jacket? - It's kind of like a jacket, a shirty kind of thing. - It's nice, anyway. - Thank you, we're looking spiffy. (laughing) - Oh my gosh, it's spiffy. I need to freshen up my wardrobe, I think. I don't need to, but I'd like to. - Yeah, yeah. - But think so, cost of living crisis. - Yeah, yeah. - Putting pressure on such things. - Yes. - Okay, anyway, you wanted to talk about the US elections. - Yes, well, we had two things that we thought we could talk about. So we talked about last week, how we were talking about doing something new, which doing a church service on Friday night, for those of you who didn't listen in the last week's episode, we talked about how to do a church service out of a youth group and build those two things together. And we talked last week about it being a little bit like getting your different elements to work together. And sometimes there can be a new thing that we're trying is to not just do church with people of the same age or just do church with everyone, but actually do a bit of a combination. And we call that intergenerational stuff, the shock absorber, because we say we're getting young people and all people working together, right? So doing new things is, there's two parts of doing something new. The first is having an idea that you think can actually move forward, but also the other part of it is to actually share with other people that you think that it can work. And it occurred to me during the week that what we said we do last week was to answer some of the questions that people might have when you do do something new like that with a Friday night. But I was thinking, I've been watching a lot of the election coverage in America. And I'm like, oh, it's kind of a similar dynamic, because the DNC, which is a democratic national convention, is seeking to make sure that people really are aware of their candidate, Carmel Harris and her running mate. And they're actually kind of doing two things. I think they're kind of reinforcing their base and helping their base to connect with their candidate, but also trying to reach out to other people that might be swing voters or even maybe Republicans to try and convince them that she's really good at what she's doing. And I was watching a lot of the coverage. And it's really interesting that as soon as they're trying to present the good news about what they're thinking, the other sides are Republicans, they're trying to do the same thing. They've already had their convention where they've done the similar kind of stuff. And watching the interplay between those two ideas is interesting because when someone comes up with an idea, there's someone else who says it's not a good idea that they have a better idea. So there is this interesting interplay of how do you convince your base and how do you convince people outside of your group that what you think is a good idea is a good idea? So I think that's kind of helpful. And I know we've only got a shorter podcast today 'cause we've got some stuff happening today so we can't go for as long. But yeah, I was interested in your thoughts on that 'cause what do you see the Democrats doing this week that are trying to pull together the support from their base and from other people? - Yeah, it's interesting. I haven't paid a lot of attention to it 'cause I've kind of tried to reduce my news diet in the last few weeks or not the last few months, I should say. But what I find interesting is that it feels like, and you can create me if I'm wrong, it feels like it's become the national conventions, both Democratic and Republican, have become more of a almost like a popularity rally rather than getting serious cultural. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, pop-cultural 'cause both sides have got various members of celebrity stuff, like Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock for the Republic. And then I know that if had other people come up for the Democrats as well. - Yeah, yeah. - I can't even remember. Well, I know that Michelle and Barack Obama got up together and they did a presentation together, I believe. So 'cause my dad would lose in the US, Tommy's like, whatever you think your politics is, the way that they presented themselves was like a brilliant display of well-presented. - So he really took it on board. - Yeah, which is interesting, right, because obviously dad doesn't get to vote in that election. But I find it, it seems like it's moved from, and I've told you before, I'm a big fan of the West Wing. So the West Wing informs a lot of the things I think about American politics, but it feels like it's gone more to here's our candidate, and let's get all famous people who agree with that candidate to get up and say why they're the right candidate, rather than what it seemed to be like before, national conventions, and obviously my ignorance of American political discourse is really showing right now. But it seems that they used to have a lot of other candidates get up to talk about policy and what their party is doing together to improve the nation, rather than vote for us and use the right choice to vote for us, that's what I think. - Yeah, that's interesting. 'Cause getting, oh, what's her name, Oprah Winfrey, to come on, for example, like she was as a black woman saying that this is the, we've got a candidate that would be the first female president. She's got Indian heritage and African American heritage, and it was really interesting that the kind of person she is was presented as a reason to vote for her as well as her policy. So, yeah, there's a lot of that sort of stuff. So, yeah, so to get straight to the questions that we had today, I think, yeah, if you just hit me up with some of the questions. - Oh, yes, excellent. Then I'll, well, it is interesting that some of these ideas that you're talking about with the conventions kind of translate to church, 'cause there's a lot of things that can be some debate around how you do church, and I think we would say, on the struggle we're over here, that we like to do church a little bit differently, which is as long as I said that it's sort of viable. So, we've come up against, sometimes people will say that's not the right way to do church, or they want to argue, or not argue, but they want to argue differently of a different approach. So, that's why it's worth talking about these ideas. When somebody asks you, we like to actually say, oh, let's answer that. We'd like to answer in a helpful way. The first question, though, and we'll just do two, I think. - Yeah, sure. - Is the congregational structure idea that we came up with the various sizes, and we like to turn them Vespa, Beadle, and Colby. Questions that came from your friend Andrew, was about how does that actually work, and what does that actually mean? Because they came up with an idea from where we've learned for church planning and things like that, of Vespa would be kind of be a smaller sized church, Beadle is a medium sized church, and Colby's a large church. - So how do we get to that point in the first place? - Yeah, in society today in general, you'll find that there's lots of new language for new things, 'cause the culture's changing all the time, and we invent new ways of describing the world. And one of the things we don't do often in the church is that we tend to stick to the same kind of terms that we've always used. But one of the things we've noticed with church planning, as we've been involved with it for the last 13 years, is that there's various sizes of churches that actually can function well, and they don't all have to be the same size. So some of the prevailing logic is that you need to have a big church that starts with 50 people in the launch team, so that it will get traction and it will grow rather than die. But I suppose because we're a network of churches and campuses that's so revival, we've had the luxury of being able to say that the whole can support the different churches to certain degrees. So it's given us a bit of freedom to go, well, there's actually ministry capacity at different levels rather than just the big church. So there's a lot written about how to get big churches to grow on that, but there's not a lot of discussion about how to work in smaller contexts. Now, there are some people in the world who are talking about micro churches, and that's a bit of a different tribe to ours, I suppose, in Sydney. You don't hear that spoken of much in Sydney, but we've come across a similar idea with what we call a connected community, that if you have a Bible study group that's actually growing, the tendencies that we think, well, let's butt it when it gets to a certain size, but what if we didn't butt it? What if we just let that Bible study continue to grow? And if a Bible study went from six to 10 to 15, maybe to seven or 18 people, what if that then became something that was in between a church and a Bible study? What if there was a potential that that could become a church? And so we've called that a Vespa, 'cause it's almost like when you get a license, the smallest vehicle you can ride on as a bike, and Vespa's pretty cool bike. You can only probably double up with one person on it, so it's a pretty zippy little thing, it's pretty flexible, but it's not very capable of having more people. But what if that Vespa was an opportunity to gather around the word of God and to pray and to read the Bible together and encourage one another, maybe without all the bells and whistles of a church service like singing and some of the other stuff, but that could be something that could birth a launch team. Now if that got bigger over 25 to 30, then maybe that would have the capacity and the ministry capacity to be a service, albeit a small one, like a first car. When you have a first car, you can fit three friends in the car and that's about it. So we call it a Beetle, 'cause that's a fun car. But then if that Beetle grows, then that could become a family car. When you've got a family car like a Comie van, you can fit more people again. So we use those three different sizes. But funnily enough, talking about how people go with that, the biggest opposition we've found to that new idea is people just go, what, a Vespa, a Beetle, a Comie, what does that mean? So in one hand, we're struggling with trying to find new language to describe something new that people aren't talking about much. But then when we come up with a language for it, people go, oh, they're so reliable with all the hippy languages. So I think that's something to be aware of, that when you do come up with a new idea, in Christian circles, you kind of need to sell it to your base first before you even convince other people of it, I think, 'cause Christians are like, what? What is that? - Right, that's a great link to the conventions thing that you're just talking about before. Cool, let's move on to the second question, which should be really just a more of a personal question in terms of you're doing ministry for the last 13 years as a senior part, so you're doing ministry a lot longer before then. And the question was, the pitfalls you've encountered in the last 13 years that could be instructive. - Excellent, this would be good segue way to next week again when you come back to it again. - Yes, I think, but look, the biggest pitfalls are just, I suppose, just to be prayerfully thinking about what are the traditions from the past that we bring forward into the now and what things do we adapt to because of culture? And the pitfall I find is sometimes it's not easy to answer that question, but if we use the Bible as a reference point, then we can actually keep testing all our new ideas on the Bible. So there are really good traditions that we want to carry over into the future. But in terms of church planning in Sydney anyway, Australian churches don't tend to have a lot of money or a lot of people. So I think we're trying to experiment with smaller groups. The pitfall we've come into that is, even though we are thinking biblically about it, sometimes we've tried to go too quick. So we have tried once to start two new churches at the same time, just to see what happened. We've eight people and 16 people. So that was probably a little bit of a pitfall. The other one is not, because we're an iterative design approach where we're trying something and then failing and then trying to work out what we could do better the next time, sometimes Christians particularly see something that doesn't work as a failure and we shouldn't have done it in the first place. So a pitfall is not explaining iterative design well enough to people. And I suppose the third thing I would say is, sometimes it's hard to know when to stop something that's not working or when to keep going. So there are three pitfalls that I think that I've learned. - And those things I suppose you learn, remember you're saying if let's blow up some rockets on the way, but then still be able to, or build a bridge to a new reality. - SpaceX, heavy group design with rockets and they blow rockets up and then test the data that they get from that. And we say as long as no one gets hurt, it's okay if something happens and doesn't work so we can learn from it. - Yep. - Yeah, they're my pitfalls that I've got. - I think there's definitely plenty more that we can talk about for next week. As we said, it's a shorter episode today. Thank you for your time. - Yeah, thank you. - Thank you for everyone just jumping in for a short amount of time and listening to what we have to say today. You can email me Joel@chockersover.com.au to have any, if you have any questions, any things you want to add to the pitfalls or anything else that we've talked about. And we always finish them one way. - One way. - One way, thanks. - Cool. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
