The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast
CNLP015 - Turning Around a Declining Church without Blowing It Apart - An Interview with Dom Ruso
Welcome to the Carrie Newhoff Leadership Podcast, a podcast all about leadership, change and personal growth. The goal to help you lead like never before in your church or in your business. And now your host, Carrie Newhoff. Well, hey, everybody, and welcome to episode 15 of the podcast. My name is Carrie Newhoff. The goal today is to help you lead like never before. And we are releasing this episode. Just a couple of days before Christmas. So if you're catching it live, when we release it, a very Merry Christmas, and maybe you're catching it on the other side, you're on your Christmas break. I hope you had a good one. I know a lot of the people who listen to this podcast either work at a church or help serve as key volunteers in the church. And often we are in the business of helping other people mark the moment, but sometimes we miss the moment and I hope that's not true for you. I hope you've taken some time to really let the meaning of Christmas sink into your heart to let God speak to you. And if that hasn't happened yet, make a little bit of time for that. Or maybe you're listening to this like months or even years down the road because our goal on this podcast is to build a leadership library. I just hope you're having an awesome day, however you're listening. The goal is to help you lead like never before. And today's guest, Dom Russo, I think is really going to help you do that. Now, if you are a regular listener to this podcast, you know that we feature people you might never have heard of and a lot of people you've probably heard of. So we've already heard from Andy Stanley, Perry Noble, Cara Powell, Casey Graham. We've heard from Tony Morgan, John Acuff, Ron Edmondson, Pete Wilson, people like that, Craig Jutilla. I mean, some great, great, great leaders that you probably heard of. Dom is probably somebody you haven't met yet, but I think you're going to be really glad that you have. Dom leads a church called Temple Baptist Church. And he got there just about two and a half years ago. We recorded this interview a few months before we broadcast it. So the timeline is a little bit advanced over when we talked, but it's been there about two and a half years and seeing some incredible changes. Now, like many of you, Dom moved into an established church and change becomes a huge issue and a very divisive, potentially divisive issue for those of us navigating in established churches. That was the first 12 years of my ministry was in an established church. And I'm also the leader of a church plant. Our church plant is just over seven years old, but even if you're a church planter, if you're church plants over like, you know, 18 months old, you're already navigating change because you've got established traditions and a lot of leaders find that super, super challenging. So I'm so excited about Dom's interview because I think he has done an incredible job of learning how to use the past to lead people into a new future. Rather than distancing himself from the past, he's leveraged it to broker a new future. It's just fascinating. When you hear the interview, you'll see how he's done that and he has made under God's direction and leadership an incredible amount of progress in just two and a half years. And so I think you're going to be super encouraged by this interview. And if you're frustrated by change or frustrated by tradition, you're going to love this because his church, the church where he leads has had a very great past like they've had some great days in the past, but those days were gone. I mean, they were in decline. They were beyond plateaued. They were definitely declining. And Dom came in and basically had to help the church move into a new century even years into a new century. And I think you'll find this an incredibly inspiring story. So without much further ado, here's my interview with Dom Russo on change. Well, it's a thrill to have Dom Russo here today. Dom, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me, Kerry. This is great. Yeah. And I'm North of Toronto. You are near Sarnia, Ontario, which a lot of people probably haven't heard of. Most people have heard of Toronto, but that's what North East of Detroit. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. We were actually bordering poor here on Michigan, so we're a border town. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. And but Montreal's your home. That's sort of where he came from. Yeah. And Montreal's a world-class city. It's great. We're an established church in Sarnia, which I think is going to be really interesting because we all go to these conferences, right, where it's like church planners talking about how they grew from zero to 10,000 overnight. And we all go home and like, "Well, that's not my story." But you're doing what a lot of podcast listeners are trying to do, whether they're trying to do it as church staff, lead pastors, or even as volunteers from the marketplace who are involved in the church, is they're trying to transition an established church. And so give us a little bit of a window on your story there and how you came to Temple Baptist in Sarnia and tell us a little bit of the background of that. Sure. Sure. I was a teaching pastor at a church in London and it was a church that had four services, was a vibrant growing church, and God started to stir my heart, the possibility of going to lead and grow in kind of a transitioning context. And so the leadership at Temple contacted me. He went through the discernment process. And you know, Kerry, when I got here, I had some ideas of what it would look like to help a community kind of realign its vision and values, but you don't really know that until you're there. Right. And you'd never done that before, right? No. You'd never tried to transition to church. And North Park, you know, it's a big influential church and it's not only been a big church. It wasn't a big church after all. Yeah. Yeah. And I was in the teaching pastor role and so I didn't, you're right, like I never really had to do that. I had a sense that I could maybe, like God had given me some of those gifts, but I had no idea. Right. So that that was part of it. And I, for the listeners, Temple has like a 75 year history and it had gone through some difficult seasons around like many churches, like the worship wars, I guess you follow. Yeah. Nobody can relate to that. No, of course not. Yeah. Were you in the worship wars when you got there? I was not. No, but I was enough aware, my wife grew up in Sarnia. Okay. She knew the history, a bit of the church, better than I did. Yeah. And so to tell you the truth early on, there was a sense of like, do I really want to, well, I survived going to a more traditional community and people who know me know that I'm really not a traditional kind of guy. But you know, you kind of try to discern God's leading and that's where we landed. And so early on, I had a sense that the church, the leadership was ready for a realignment of their vision and values and mission. Right. But I think they would say, like most churches, like, we're just not sure how to do that. And how painful is this going to be, you know, which is that, which is really the unspoken. Yeah. And so, so did they actually say that out loud? Like how painful is this going to be? I can feel it. I can feel it, you know, and you're like, hopefully not, but yeah, for me either. Like, right. For me. So there was some of that. The other point that might be helpful for the listeners is that the person who was here before me was here for about 10 years. His name is Steve Jones, a wonderful pastor who transitioned to become the president of our fellowship. Okay. So I followed kind of someone with kind of a real legacy to the fellowship Baptist churches, evangelical churches in Canada and really wanting to do well and continue in that story in some ways. Yeah. And so you've got really no experience in transitioning a church. You're a young leader. I mean, you've only been at this a few years. You had had what really is a unique job, like when a church in the size of North Park in London, I mean, that can afford a teaching pastor. I mean, you're at several thousand people in the whole deal and so now you move in and you're in the trenches. And what size was Temple when you got there? I would say when I was here in general, I think of the first few weekends I looked at our boat and I would say 300, 350 with children and, you know, somewhat trying to find a sense of stability, but ready for the change. So our auditorium seats about a thousand. So you can imagine it's a bit painful in some way feeling a little bit empty. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so having said that, I think the attitude and the spirit of the people leadership was like, God has some fresh things in store for us. And I was in at the sermon phase of God. How do I kind of draw that out and how do we do it in a way that really honors the history of this community? Right? And that was a key thing for me. Yeah. And that's not always intuitive to leaders now just in terms of context before we go much further. How long have you been there now? Going into our third year this August. Yeah. So you came two years ago and starting your third year together. So this is this is all fairly recent history and so 350 and they had seen better days. There was a day when the auditorium was more full. Oh, yeah. There were times in their hey, they even evening service had had like 900 people. Wow. Yeah. I was a growing church. And hey, they being like the fifties or the eighties or the nineties. Yeah. Before the worship tension and just to imagine like for the listeners, Sarnia has about like 85,000 in the population. So you know, to build a church to see a thousand is some serious vision. Oh, yeah. No kidding. And then to fill it in a town of 85,000 and it's not like there's a whole bunch of feeder communities around Sarnia, like it's just on the edge of Toronto or New York City. It's not. I mean, you drive an hour to get to Sarnia. Yeah. You really do. Yeah. And there's a lot of other churches too. So that was part of the, yeah, part of the unknown for me in coming year, but yet believing that the God wanted to stretch me as a leader and help me to learn some things about leadership. And I thought, you know what, one of the real responsibilities of leaders in the future is going to have to be navigating a change for communities like Temple because there's many of them. Oh, yeah. That's a vast majority of churches that are out there. So get the picture now and then we're going to go into the changes you made and how you made them because you did some really interesting things. So in two years, new leader never really held the position. Church needing change, but really scared of change. What's it look like today? You've seen a lot of growth. Yeah. Well, I mean, I just always, you know, you always want to say how grateful God's using me and our team. And, you know, we're now, I would say really seeing the church grow, not the numerical thing can be somewhat trite, you know, but I would just to help people understand, you know, 750 sometimes we have up to eight, eight hundred, eight, 20 on a weekend. So it's doubled more than doubled. Yeah. You know, we have parking lot of tenants to help us squeeze everybody into the parking lot, and we've been able to keep that still to one service, which is good on volunteer and staff are giving again, is a continued to increase, which has allowed us to bring on an executive pastor who now works with me, which is a blessing. So that's kind of the where we're at now and what we're dreaming about is maybe a multi site, a plant, a waste to continue to, you know, reach this community for the gospel. Of course, and I think you resonate with just about everybody listening in who's involved in a church. It's pretty amazing. Now what are some of the key changes you've made because that doesn't just happen automatically accidentally. So what are some of the key changes you made? So I would say one of the first things that we had to work through, and I had to really help our elders and leadership understand is we needed a governance tweak. Yeah. Our governance model probably was set up in a way to almost keep the church small. And so through conversations and through, you know, intentional preparation for meetings and just showing that the church said, you know, how do we make some changes to some of some of how the structure works? That was part one. But the other thing, Kerry, I don't even think we talked about this, but the other thing is I didn't anticipate that some of the leadership changes that were required would be handed to me rather than me slowly picking them. Okay. So say more about that. How did that happen? So you made some changes. We started to make some changes and then what happened is for the context here, we had a Christian school connected to the church. That was going through some of their own changes and some of their own reevaluation. And that became a real priority, became a priority whether I liked it or not. It wasn't on my radar. I didn't anticipate having to think about that right away, but it became a priority. So in addition to the first year of just growth and change, we were dealing with a crisis of whether we should keep open or close a Christian school that was here for 25 years. Yeah, and that's a big deal. Not everybody has it, but from the churches I know I've never operated in that context. I mean, if you've got a Christian school or a nursery or a daycare or something like that, that's a big deal if you shut that thing down. So what happened with that? It was huge. I mean, we really began, I would say that one of the blessings that I had gained enough trust in that first year of leading, that when I tackled and began the conversation of year two around the school, which became a real important decision for us, I had by God's grace, I had some trust wins in the bank with our leadership. How did you build up? Okay. So finish that and then we'll go back to the trust thing. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe, yeah. Actually, maybe I'll talk about building trust. Great. Yeah. That kind of helped us with that. Did you keep it open or close it, by the way? We closed it this summer, the school closed. Wow. Wow. And here's one amazing thing. School closed, church didn't split, our attendance continued to go up and in the midst of all of those challenges that we navigated carefully and pastorally are giving continue to go up and the church is still strongly united. Okay. Now we got to hear how did you build that kind of trust? Because that is a huge thing and that would blow some churches apart. It really would. No kidding. And to be honest, just for the listeners to know, you know, I'm telling you a lot of this stuff in hindsight, as it was happening, there were moments where I thought this is going to be a crisis moment for this church. Yeah. This wasn't easy. Everybody didn't stand up and applaud and write you things. Okay. So to back it up, I think a few of the things that I did early on that maybe we'll really encourage listeners was that I realized that I wasn't trained in seminary to manage change well. Like, you know, you don't have a class on managing ecclesiastical change. Oh, you don't. So I tried to really put on my listeners tap very quickly in the process. Oh, yeah. Sometimes I did that I think is gone down as probably one of the most strategic things I did, which you know, Kerry is there. When I first got the job here, I through some relationships, I found that who the person who planted temple was a wonderful man of God who's still alive named Dr. Hal McBane. That's incredible. So he planted it 75 years ago and he's still alive, he's still alive. Yeah. 76 years ago. Now. Wow. He planted the church and through some relationships and friendships, I got a connection to where he was, which was in Oxford, Ontario at this seniors facility that he was really struggling with his health. And I went down with some camera team of some, some guys and, and I just sat down and listened to him and just said, tell me about what God was doing in your heart when you planted this church. Tell me some of the challenges you faced early on that really made you feel like it's not going to work. And I just let him talk. And part of that was one for me to learn and listen, but at some point I knew I would want to kind of draw this interview out for our church to hear, hear a temple. And so what I did is in the midst of that interview, I captured parts of the interview that would really, I think really help us propel the vision and move the church forward. And our 75th anniversary of temple happened in my first year when I got here. And I surprised the church and the leadership with that interview that I had with Dr. Homick Baine. No way. And what did he say in that interview? I mean, there you are a leader, you know, starting out young leader. And there's a man who's got to be in his nineties now. He's got to be. He was, yeah, he, you know, he said some things that I remember intentionally thinking that will never work for temple now. That's just for me to know. Yeah. And he said other things that were really some basic things around here are the sacrifices I made when, when I sensed God cart this church, I'll never forget. He tells the story about asking, I wasn't even a bank, but it was a lending, you know, organization to lend them a little bit of money to buy this little piece of land where they thought they could start the church. And it was all ready to go. And when they went into cash in because they needed the money, this lending organization said, Oh, we forgot to tell you, we actually don't have the money for a little while. I was like, what? And he, I said, did you cry? Like, what do you do? Like your church planter, you're like, when church planting isn't cool, right? And he said, I just, in a sense, he said, I think he's, I like, I laughed and said, God, if you're going to do this, then you're going to have to give us a new way to work this out. And he told the people of the church this, and within a few weeks, they sacrificed more than ever before to raise the funds to be able to get that property. That's crazy. I was like, wow, wow. So you told that story? Yeah. That story. Yeah. And then, and then he was actually very supportive of the direction you wanted to take the church in. Isn't that correct? Yeah. He was really encouraging. I asked him the kinds of questions. I asked him questions about it. If you could share any wisdom with a young leader, what would you say? And you know, he was so encouraging, like, Dom, you just need to call the church to where God's calling them. And he had a forceful way about him. I don't think it would work today in every leadership context. But I knew what he was saying. And I think our church understood that there's some great things in store for us. And we don't want to, I guess, either tarnish or ignore the legacy of people who've sacrificed for us to be here today. So I think one of the things I call temple to is what will our sacrifice look like. See, that's crazy. I hope people are catching this because a lot of the times when it comes to change, people think, well, if we change, we're going to be disloyal to the people who founded the church and what you discovered in talking to the founding pastors, just the opposite. You're going to be disloyal by not changing, because we didn't set up a museum, we set up a mission. Exactly. And the language I use with our church all the time is there's a difference between learning from the past and living in the past. Oh, that's great. That for me is like, maybe my studies are in history, so we need to learn from the past. But we can't live in it. And what's beautiful about Dr. McBain is his leadership and even his wisdom just constantly stayed away from the dangers of living in the past. Dr. McBain didn't want them to live in the past either. He's like, go for it. My life is coming to an end, but the mission of the church isn't. And that was genius. When I heard you share that with me, I thought, ah, we got to share that with listeners because you can leverage the past for the sake of the future. And rather than live in it, leverage it. I think that's brilliant. And so just to back up for that gave me incredible trust. With people who as a young leader, I think it was an unspoken. I came here when I was 35 and I had this tension of like, you know, more senior leaders thinking this guy, you know, young people with their gadgets who just care about the future. And you I think it just reminded them, Dom wants to know about our history and our story too. And that's cute. We won't all have a founder ready to do a video interview, but I think when you look around and this resonates with my experience, you've got people who've been around longer than you and who've been there for 20, 30, 40 years who have a heart for the mission. And if you can help them focus on the mission aspect and say, hey, we need to do this, that is a way of sort of brokering the past to leverage the future as well. Yeah, and I think to what it does, what it taught me is that I have to as a leader, one of my key responsibilities is to gauge the temperature or the pace at which this community can handle change. I think that's a real secret. It's an unknown leadership responsibility almost. So again, let's talk about that because some people would say, oh, yeah, well, that's why I can't do anything for five years, but you've only been there for two. And you've shut down a Christian school, you've made some changes on the weekend, you've changed some of the programs, you've changed the structure. So how do you calibrate? How do you know what the pace of change is and how did you figure that out for temple and for your community? That's a great question. I would say one of the things that helped me learn this is that God gave me certain opportunities early on to help me accelerate change at this church. And those are God moments, you really can't create them, but when they happen, you can capitalize on them. So for example, as the church started to grow, that just in teaching and in people seeing their kids or their grandchildren start to come back, that was a window that really gave me acceleration in change. People, they give you more grace when they realize God is moving among us. If that's not happening or that's not really the season I was in, I think I would be still slowly managing some of these things. So let's rewind a little bit. Okay, my guess is that your second weekend, 750 people didn't magically show up. You had to calibrate that a little bit. So was it that when the trickle started, a younger family, a child, a grandchild, a couple people from the community? What did you do? Did you showcase that? Did you talk about it? Did you use that to cast vision? How did that happen? Yeah, I think I told those stories. I celebrated, one of the things I remember intentionally doing is celebrating that we need a parking team because people are coming and when I reminded our church how we need to say thank you to those people who are making space for us to make room to reach the lost. So just I think in my preaching, I just celebrated the things that could go under the radar. And I just said, hey, let's not ignore that the reason we need a parking team is that more people are coming. Okay. You just said something. I don't want people to miss. You said, in my preaching, I celebrated because sometimes those of us who are communicators, anytime you write an email, anytime you get up and speak on a Sunday morning, anytime you get to do the announcements, let's say you're not a senior leader, you have the opportunity to cast vision and you weren't waiting for the congregational meeting at the end of the year, beginning of the year. You weren't waiting for some special occasion. I mean, this is something you did every week. This is something you would just weave into the fabric of your normal everyday leadership. Yeah. All the time. Like, I really, I really tried to do that and think about that when I was working on a sermon. But I also remember thinking I have to learn to intentionally do this with my team because one of the other, I think, unspoken lessons that I had to learn in addition to the calibration and the pace of change was I realized that most of my staff wasn't ready to manage a growing church. Right. So we forget that we have to pastor our team as we pastor our church. Okay. That's really, really critical, right? Because they were used to staffing for 300, 350 people. Yeah. Like children. Mindsets. So our children's ministry goes from having seven toddlers to 21 and every like, what's, what do we do? Like, what do you mean? This is a crisis. Yeah. So, so what did you do? I think I just continue to emphasize one is the, the wonderful, the rareness of this, you know, and how we want to, we don't want to let this moment go by and not celebrate that God's doing something special. Thankfully, I think has given, given continuing to increase, we were able to work through some ball out here and staffing issues that allowed us to really strengthen our teams. But the other thing too, I think our leadership, our deacons and elders took a risk on saying, let's really push the budget next year and put an infrastructure in place to allow our church to continue to grow. So it had that risk factor in there. Yeah. And people have responded. Isn't that great? So you leveraged the past without living in it, which was huge, you celebrated all the small wins. And I mean, if it's like, okay, it's seven to 21 babies. I mean, some people would look at that, you can look at that 300% growth or whatever. But at the end of the day, it's 14 kids, but you leverage that to make a difference. And talk about your team because everybody's got senior leaders, right? And you're used to running, let's say you're running 40 people, you used to running for 40. What happens when you become 80? If you're used to 400, what happens when you become 800? 800, 1600. I mean, we're that right now. We're trying to get past the 1000 mark and we're in a building project and we know it's going to be different with 1500 people in the room than it is with 1000. So how do you walk a team through that and how do you get them ready for that moment? Yeah, I mean, Carrie, you know, just like I know, like if you can, to answer that question is really the million dollar question. How do you do that? Is I think one, I had a chance, I had worked with the team for that year, so I had a sense of their styles and I knew some of them naturally could move into like a more supervisory type of role. Like they could understand, they have to step out of just doing the ministry and oversee the ministry like it actually. And then some of the other team members who weren't there yet, with the addition of our executive pastor, we made it a goal to help them go there. And I remember them feeling, I'll never forget a conversation I had with our worship director, who's a wonderful young leader and is actually grew up in Sarnia. So has a lot of relational credibility in our community. When I said to him, when I got here, I said, you know, his name is Andy, I said, Andy, you know, the goal is not for you to lead worship every weekend. And he likes, was like, what, he's like, they pay me to lead worship. And I remember trying to walk him through, no, we pay you to give us a vision for what worship can look like and you get the opportunity as part of that to lead us in that process. Wow. And so I said to him in the years time, one of the goals I want for you is to have another worship leader leading worship one time a month. That's great. And you figure, right? He would have seen that I was great, you know, I get a breather. It was really difficult for him to understand that. Oh, yeah. Right. Like, pay me to be up. So what will people say? How will people think on people think I'm not working? And I said, let me manage that. Oh, listen, I'll tell you all about that because I work in a North Point strategic partner world. And I'll tell you half the time I don't speak on a Sunday morning. We run Andy Stanley and it's very hard sometimes to go in because I'm like, how do I even justify a paycheck? I don't have any responsibilities like I'm not hosting because I've recruited other people to host. I'm not running kids men. I'm not even needed. But ironically, as you know, if you study organizations, that's what you're supposed to do when you're the leader. You're supposed to be encouraging high fiving. If you're needed on a Sunday morning in the trenches, you're not doing your job. Yeah. Yeah. And if you're needed all the time, you don't have room in your day to envision what the next steps look like, which may be, you know, yeah, you're working in it. You can't work on it. And so that was a big transition. And so you coached your team to really lead leaders rather than run ministries. Yeah. And I would say that's the season we're in right now, making that shift more natural, so that we can really move to the next place of leadership. So I remember Easter a week in this past week and we went to two services. And I mean, I think we broke like, you know, over a thousand people were here. It's amazing. And obviously it's Easter, but we went to two services just to get a taste of whether a team could manage two services. And I remember that being a calibration for me, I'm like, I don't think we can probably manage this every weekend. So let's take it back and prepare what would we do to get to that place? What does it look like to get there? It's really smart. No, that's really, really smart to do that. And the team has been responding to that as you go along. Any resources that have helped you have there been conferences you've attended, books you've read together, anything that you've done or has it been more just individual one-on-one conversations? I think, I mean, one of the things we did is we for two years in a row, we went to exponential together as a team. Yeah, great conference. Yeah. And it built a lot of trust with us. It allows us to learn together in the main sessions and do some breakouts that really address our own ministry, unique ministry focuses. Then, you know, outside of that and we just did some reading around staying healthy as a protein star relationship with God, because what I'm learning carry is that all change flows from an emotionally healthy leadership place. It requires that. And I think God did something special in my heart during our transition with the school, which really was even more important than what was happening with the school, was whether I could trust him as a leader to either, you know, to bring those pieces together, even when I wasn't sure how it was going to go. Right. I wasn't sure what the answer was there. Yeah, you kind of, at a certain point with your growth curve, you relinquish control, right? Yeah. And that's hard. I mean, you relinquish control with the team, you relinqu, and you still keep the mission vision and strategy central, but there's a point at which it really is, even for you as a leader, a matter of trust, more than anything. Yeah. And I think Andy Stanley helped me with that. I heard him share about, you know, how sometimes as leaders, we don't always have to have control or have all the answers, but we can continue to move people along. And for me, I've continued to just keep people's eyes on the right things and through that cooperative discernment, we've seen things together, you know, that God was just leading us to. Yeah. That's really true. So let's talk about pushback. Okay. Because that's where, I mean, these are all great stories and like doubling the size in two years and shutting down a school and the whole deal. But this hasn't all been, you know, sunshine and roses. Let's talk about that. When did you get pushback and where did it become most intense? I would say, you know, there's a level of pushback that was there all the time from the beginning. I mean, there was always people who were, you know, wondering about this young punk kid or, you know, whether this, you know, I mean, they don't say that, but there's always a sense of there's this, there's pushback around small changes. I think the biggest pushback came when we kind of really had to navigate the school situation. Yeah. And that's why I tried early on to say, I'm not going to make that my focus. It's like leadership suicide, you know what I mean? But it became the focus whether I liked it or not. Yeah. And but you did it, right? Even if you tried not to focus on it, you did it. Yeah. And so there was a lot of pushback there because I learned early on that whether we kept the school open or whether we kept the school closed and the people that represented those groups, I was called by God to be the pastor of both of those groups. Oh, that's huge. Yeah. And I had to I had to carefully remind myself, I can't just pastor the people who nationally align with where maybe I'm sensing we need to go. I will be accountable to Jesus on how I pastor everybody. Wow. Cause I think there's something inside all of us who only want to pastor the people who are like us or yeah, that is easy. So how did you pastor the people who differed from you on that? One of the things I intentionally just prayed for them to be able to see that myself and our elders were doing everything we could to have the church's best interest in mind. Wow. Yeah. Regularly. I realized that if I could get praying for them, it would keep me from ever being upset, you know, in a kind of immature way at them or being just kept praying and saying, Jesus, you know, they're, they're living out of a, an emotional place because of their passion for, you know, in this case, Christian education. And I love that, you know, I love that they're passionate about this, but we still have to make some incredibly difficult changes here. So practically, what did the pushback look like? Like difficult meetings, emails, um, yeah, what did it look like? Well, let me, let me see, let me, uh, there was all of that plus one of the things that really, uh, added complexity to the situation is that the school had gotten to the place where it served the needs more of the people in our community in Sarnia than the people in our church. Gotcha. So the pushback and the gossip and the tension and the, you know, the confusion was actually happening from other churches and other families that I wasn't their pastor. Oh, wow. So I couldn't really, it's, so they didn't know me well enough. So when they heard a narrative about whether it was true or false, it became their narrative. Right. I couldn't just show up at their church and say, Hey, by the way, this is what Don Maris was really like. Right. Right. But so you had to get to the point where you were okay, allowing people to believe things that weren't necessarily true. Yeah. I really did that. That is very, very difficult because you hear the rumors and I mean, we've brokered enough change, even in our community, like the things people said about what I was doing or who I was just wasn't true. It just wasn't true. Yeah. Yeah. It's not true. And you know, you realize that sometimes trying to defend yourself can make it worse. Oh, yeah. That's a hard lesson. Some people are not out to get the truth. Yeah. That's a good point. That's the whole, I realized that I'm like, even if they knew the truth, I don't think it would matter. Yeah. Yeah. And, but you had a core around you. Let me guess this. You had a core of people around you who did know the truth and that's what got me. It's like, okay, if the people I admire most respect the most who are closest to me can say, carry your handling this with integrity. I felt like, okay, I bet you might have only father thinks I'm handling this with integrity and I want to be right before God in them. But if my inner circle is going, you are off the rails and just, you know, come on. That's when I'm like, okay. I've got to really pay attention. Was there a similar dynamic at work in your leadership? Yeah. It was part of my discernment as the leader to say, you know, if our deacons and our elders and our staff are not really united on this, the division among us is going to be like multiplied exponentially when it gets out. So I really felt that we had gotten to a place at those different leadership levels where there's an incredible unity about the right, the next step. And that really carried us forward. The other thing was that there were enough people in our church who knew me, I think because I spent time with people across the board, right? That when the narrative started that we're in true, they just washed them for me. Right. They knew. Hey, this is not that way. This is nonsense. So tell me, do you have any other areas where you got pushback? I mean, there had to be a few more, but just in the time remaining share a couple where you got some pushback and how it surfaced. Yeah. I mean, the pushback, again, like I would say probably just related to the school, I mean, there was continual struggle as we went through, you know, different layers of meetings and deliberation and communication. So that was always there. Some of the, I just just said, some of the other general pushback is just around realigning the vision to reach our community and what kind of changes that going to cause. I mean, when you lose your seat and you've been sitting in for 20 years, you know, you start to feel like, okay, what's going on here? And I don't think anybody in the church intentionally is trying to push back because they love Jesus and I need to give them that, you know, I need to be careful to not say they don't want to change. That means they're pagans or something. Yeah. Yeah. You know what I mean? I do. But one of the things that I was learning is that as our church grew, the pushback came because people needed to grieve the fact that their old church was gone. Oh, that's huge. Yeah. And I had to learn to let them grieve to say, you know, when people say to me, I don't know any of the people like, I don't know any of the people here on Sunday morning anymore. I would be like, that's great. But they said in a way that as a pastor, I had to hear that that's not necessarily good, is it? Right. Tell me why that, what that means. So how did you let them grieve like, how do you do that? You just do you listen or empathize or what do you do? Yeah. One is I listened and I just acknowledged that that that's hard, you know, I acknowledge that it's okay to grieve. The other thing as I did is I strategically planned a teaching series around the book of backs, which we're in right now on how the church from its inception had to work through changes that caused this type of tension. Wow. That's really good. The Bible, the Bible has wisdom for us in this season, cool. And after that, I think what I tried to regularly add just moments where God was working in people's lives. It seemed to be like cream on a wound, like just a bit of this is painful, but God is at work in that younger life, right? And that family is new and they're coming to our church and our newcomers lunch has 30 people in it. What? That's amazing. So I would add a bit of that to just help the grieving. That's so good. And then eventually would most of those people get on board or you probably lost a few along the way too? I would say I lost a few, maybe in like being disappointed, but I don't think we've lost many that have left, like I said, like we don't want to be part of this church, right? That's really cool. So last question, because this is flown by, but if you had some advice for listeners who hadn't hit that breakthrough point yet, what would it be? You know, I thought about that question a lot and the thing that came to mind Kerry is that one of the things that might really help listeners and it helped me is to not make the breakthrough point, the point. Okay. Same more about that. Same more about that. Yeah. I think the breakthrough is that God is doing something in you as the leader and something in your people on the journey towards breakthrough. And if breakthrough is the goal, then you'll just force your way to get to the breakthrough because that's the goal. Wow. And so I learned along the way to say, although I would like to see this as the dead end or the final celebration and we'll get there soon, teach me God that every day we learn something as a staff or we manage a crisis, these are small breakthroughs along the way that are so important for our church and help me to celebrate those as important because if I'm only looking at the big breakthrough as a time to say, well, now I made it as a leader. Now I feel, you know, that might never come like the promised land might never come. Right. Well, that's really cool. You know, because when you look at this, it's been a series of small wins and you started with some very small things that 24 months later, it's like, oh my goodness, there's, it's doubled. Like that's crazy. We're different. Yeah, we're a different church. You're a different church. Well, I hope that's been really encouraging and dumb. I can't thank you enough for taking some time to spend with us today. Thank you. It's been an honor and hopefully this encourages some of the people listening and the leaders that are working through change and there's lots to be learned out there. And I think, I think when we're humble as leaders and say, God, teach me as you're teaching your church and as you're calling us to some great things, God does some extraordinary things. And so it's an honor to be leading this community. He sure does. Thanks so much, Dom. Thanks, Gary. Well, wasn't that an incredible interview with Dom? I learned so much about change. And if you want to get more insight, you can just head on over to the show notes. You'll find them at kerrynewhoff.com/episode15 and in there you will discover if you take away also some quotes from Dom and all the links, like to his church's website, how you can contact him. And if you've got a question, just leave a comment and we'll do our best to get back to you and answer that to the best of our ability and certainly my ability. So I know so many people are navigating change. And I know it can be so frustrating. I also wrote a book a couple of years ago on change called Leading Change Without Losing It. And if you're interested in picking up a copy, you can get information in the show notes and the links will be right there or you can go to leadingchangewithoutlosingit.com. And you can get it for Kindle, for your iPad and also get the hard copy versions there. So that's a little bit about change. A couple of things that really stood out to me. I love how Dom said there's a difference between learning from the past and living in it. And I love the way he talked to people, including the founder of the church, to really help uncover their heart behind the church. Because I think at the end of the day, what we're trying to navigate for those of us leading change in a local context is we're trying to take the intentions of the past and apply them to the future. And sometimes the methodologies of the past don't work anymore, but the heart behind what they did a generation ago or two generations ago is the same heart that's going to drive us into the future. So I think what Josh did in leveraging that with people was fantastic. So we did not set up museums, we set up a mission, and that's what we have to keep in mind. So I hope this encourages you again, everything's in the show notes at karaenohoff.com/episode15. I want to thank all of you for listening. And thanks to everybody who subscribed. If you haven't done that, that's the best way to not miss an episode. We are back next week with Jeff Henderson, going to help everybody become a better communicator in the brand new year. Jeff's got some incredible insight, so you don't want to miss that. And the best way to never miss an episode is to subscribe. And you can do that on iTunes, on Stitcher, on TuneIn Radio. And for everybody who's left a review, thank you. And if you would have some time to leave a review, I would be so, so grateful for that. So just leave an honest review. It really helps this show get in front of other leaders. So if this has helped you, it's a great way to get back into the community. We are back next Tuesday with a brand new episode, Jeff Henderson, talking all about how anyone, including us preachers, but also those of us who are not, can be a better communicator. So you want to listen for that. Thanks so much. And again, if you're listening to this around the time of release, Merry Christmas. We'll see you next time. [MUSIC]