Helping People Heal After Church Hurt : Joe Dobbins

Full-Text Transcript

How can our ministries become safe places of healing for those who’ve experienced church hurt?

Jason Daye
In this episode, I’m joined by Joe Dobbins. Joe is the lead pastor of Twin Rivers Church in St Louis, Missouri. Joe regularly contributes to the work of the greater church by providing resources, strategic thinking, and serving on a number of ministry boards. His most recent book is entitled Hope After Church Hurt. Together, Joe and I explore, from a very pro-church perspective, the current reality of church hurt that many have experienced from churches and from ministry leaders. Joe provides an incredible heart posture and a very practical approach to helping our ministries become places where those who have been wounded can find healing and hope. Are you ready? Let’s go.

Jason Daye
Hello, friends, and welcome to another episode of FrontStage BackStage. I’m your host, Jason Daye. Each and every week, I have the honor and privilege of sitting down with a trusted ministry leader, and we dive into a topic in an effort to help you and pastors and ministry leaders just like you really embrace a sustainable, healthy rhythm so that you can flourish in both life and leadership. We are proud to be a part of the Pastor Serve Network. Not only do we record an episode and release a show each week, but we also create an entire toolkit for you and your team at your local church that you can download and dig more deeply into the topic at hand. Now, you can find that for this episode and every episode at PastorServe.org/network. In the toolkit, you’ll find a number of resources, including a ministry leaders growth guide. Now that growth guide has insights pulled out of the conversation as well as questions for reflection that you can process through with your leadership team at your local church. So be sure to check out those resources at PastorServe.org/network. Now, at Pastor Serve, we love walking alongside of pastors and ministry leaders, and if you’d like to learn more about how you can receive a complimentary coaching session, you can find that information at PastorServe.org/freesession. So again, be sure to check that out. Now, if you’re joining us on YouTube, please give us a thumbs up and take a moment to drop your name and the name of your church in the comments below. We love getting to know our audience better, and we will be praying for you and your ministry. Whether you’re joining us on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform, please be sure to subscribe, to follow, and hit that notification bell so you do not miss out on any of these great conversations. This week we have a wonderful conversation for you. I would like to welcome at this time Joe Dobbins to the show. Joe, welcome.

Joe Dobbins
Hey, Jason. Thanks so much for having me today. It’s an honor to be here and it’s particularly an honor to be with so many pastors and leaders who I’m one of and love dearly.

Jason Daye
Awesome, brother. Yeah, we’re excited to have you on the show and really looking forward to the conversation that we’re going to dive into because it’s a conversation that is really important. We need to make space for this kind of conversation because we’re touching on a reality that you, as a local church pastor and local church pastors, are experiencing and recognizing, probably more and more, and that is people that we’re encountering, people that might be walking through the doors of our local churches that have experienced church hurt to some degree in their lives. Joe, you have recently released a new book entitled Hope After Church Hurt, which really addresses this reality. You’ve kind of leaned in and helped us understand a little bit better about the prevalence of church hurt, and you do it from a very hopeful posture, right? Because you are a pastor, you are pro-church, and you believe in the power of the gospel, as it’s demonstrated through local churches in cities around the world and the impact that that has on people. So Joe, to start off, tell us, why did you put pen to paper? Why did you write Hope After Church Hurt?

Joe Dobbins
Yeah. Well, I think, like many pastors, it started with the seeds of conversations. Post-pandemic, many churches had a lot of new faces come through the door. A lot of people who may have been in other churches or disconnected from church and what I noticed is that a great deal of those conversations centered around hurts that had not been healed or resolved. Not from family, not from jobs, but from churches. I just thought to myself, there is an ever-growing group. Then when I got into it and started looking at the data, the University of Northern Colorado did a study some years ago, and they found that there are 65 million people in America who once were regular attenders at church that no longer attend church. Well, that’s roughly the same number of people who attend church each week in America. So there’s this ever-growing group of people who live by this mantra, I love Jesus, but I don’t care for his people. That is what I thought we needed to step into. I almost consider it for pastors and leaders to almost be another harvest. Today, we don’t just need churches that reach the lost. We need churches that heal the found. So we decided to start going on that journey and becoming a place of healing, having conversations that a lot of people aren’t comfortable having, and also being honest about our own shortcomings as leaders. What it did is it morphed into a book, and it created an opportunity for us to help the global church, not just our own church here in Saint Louis.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I love that, Joe. Now, Joe, as you were kind of processing through this, you had some “aha” moments, right? You had some things that you were discovering as you were kind of putting all this together. We’re going to get to the idea of, how do we help our local churches be places of healing for those that have been hurt by the church. But before we get there, Joe, what are some of the reasons that you uncovered that people were experiencing church hurt or maybe avoiding the local church because of poor experiences?

Joe Dobbins
Well, in the book, I tackle eight specific hurts. So, I do believe proper labeling is important. The idea is that we give space for people who have struggled because they’ve been judged, people who have endured the horrors of sexual abuse, or people who have been under a toxic leader even. So the reality, I think, is that properly labeling them was something that I realized because each person’s hurt is unique, and the path forward is unique as well. But I think the thing that I learned the most was that, ultimately, this is just going to take a little bit more time, and it’s going to require us to be very intentional as leaders. Imagine for a second that you went to a hospital, you had a condition, and you had planned to get that treated. You go to the hospital, you go in for the treatment, and then, due to the negligence of a technician, a nurse, or even the doctor, you wake up from your anesthesia, and then you find out they didn’t correct it, and you’re actually worse than you came. That there’s a compounding issue now. Well, now you would have the problem that you don’t have confidence in the place that actually was supposed to heal the initial condition. That is church hurt in a kind of nutshell, is that people already have so many pains from sin, bad choices, and things that are done to them, but then when they come to the church expecting to get healed and find someone who doesn’t act like Christ or doesn’t operate according to the law of Christ’s love, then it just becomes a place where you feel like, A, I can’t heal, and B, I have no confidence in this place that claims it’s a place of healing. I think that the conundrum that many people are in, is they just feel like they have nowhere to go because they’ve lost confidence in the church’s ability to care for them.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s excellent imagery for us to kind of process and think through church hurt because it really kind of makes it come alive for us. Oftentimes, I think, as pastors and ministry leaders, especially of late, there’s been a lot of media, there’s been a lot of rocks thrown at the church as a whole, that we realize we need to be reflective, and we need to understand Joe, that there are definitely things that we need to change. There are definitely wolves in sheep’s clothing within the church, right? It shouldn’t be a surprise to us. Jesus even spoke of this, right? Paul wrote about this. So we understand that’s a reality. How can we better process through, in light of the world in which we find ourselves, in light of maybe some of the mistrust around the local church and mistrust around pastors? How do we really process through the reality of church hurt without, as leaders, getting defensive, but really understanding that this is an opportunity, a gospel opportunity, and there are people who need this healing?

Joe Dobbins
Yeah, I think that it starts with the leader, obviously, that we first have to have a healthy understanding of what we’re serving and the climate we’re in. Today you just mentioned it, a lot of pastors are judged not based on what they’ve done, but on what other peers to them have done. So just recognizing that versus becoming defensive to it and looking at it as an opportunity to heal versus an opportunity to defend that you’re not that person, I think, is first and foremost. It’s just part of what we deal with now having a globalization of information. Then I think the second thing that’s essential for good leadership, outside of this topic and in this topic, is just consistent self-awareness. Allowing God’s word to open our hearts. James says that God’s word is a mirror that allows us to see the places that are missing, whether that’s pride, apathy, or whatever it is. The reality is we need to be greatly self-aware as leaders. Then I think the last thing is to just leap with humility and own the mistakes we do make. When I’m short with someone, when I make a poor decision that maybe hurts someone else, from a standpoint that I didn’t know… just own it and be that. That’s why, if you read the book, the very beginning of the book, in the introduction, I apologize for all the people that I’ve hurt, for all the people that I’ve done wrong to. I just recognize I’m fallible as a leader. I think when I start from that place, people do extend a grace to people who admit from the beginning I’m not perfect. So I do think if a pastor can maturely go, I’m going to respond to this knowing I’m going to have to deal with some stuff I didn’t create. Second is that I’m going to make mistakes and then just be authentic in that. You’ll find that people will give you a lot of space to speak into their lives.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I love that. I love in the book how you point out in the introduction the reality that oftentimes, in ministry, we somehow think that we have to be demonstrating that we’ve got it figured out, we’ve got it all together, or that we’re not tripping up. Then we get more of a defensive posture and we begin to cover up for mistakes and stuff that we experience or that we that we make ourselves. But really the posture, the heart posture, is one of, hey, I’m on this journey as well. I’m not always going to get it right and a little bit of this idea of humility in leadership, as opposed to, we’ve got to have it all figured out. Joe, talk to us a little bit about that reality, that humility and leadership, that honesty that you talk about, what were some ways that you experienced that maybe in your own ministry, and what recommendations do you have for pastors who feel the pressure of leading a flock of people and yet understanding that we don’t always get it right?

Joe Dobbins
Well, I think at the end of the day, I can empathize with someone who’s experienced church hurt because I’ve experienced church hurt. I know that there’s not a pastor on the planet who hasn’t. As a matter of fact, one of the chapters that didn’t make it into the book is “sheep bite, too”. The truth is, any pastor who can take a moment to reflect on wounding words or people who were backbiting or betraying them, can recognize and find an empathy that allows them to really help other people because they themselves have experienced it. But I also think being open about that. If you read the book, you’ll find many stories where I personally was hurt and what I had to do to walk through forgiveness or walk through the healing process. I think that’s essential. Leaders go first. So if we want to take people on a healing journey, we have to go first. Now I do want to say this to leaders because I have no doubt every person listening today that leads a church wants to be a place of healing. We know that we serve a healing God, yet many times people go unhealed in our local churches. One of the reasons I think pastors don’t see a measure of healing in their ministry the way they want to is because, frankly, they just are under so much pressure. Healing requires patience. So let me say this, in the New Testament, we have a list of gifts and in the list, there are both miracles and healing. Oftentimes, we use those interchangeably but they’re distinct in Scripture. Miracles are when God does something instantaneously. Healing is when God does something incrementally. What I found of most churches is they have the faith for miracles, but they don’t have the patience for healing. Most of the people who need to walk out an inner healing journey and it’s just going to take some time. Often, the reason pastors get impatient, and impatience leads to defensiveness is because pastors are carrying too much. They don’t have people around them to help them carry the load of operations at the church or to help carry the load of counseling. So if there’s a pastor listening today who just feels like, Man, all these people are hurting, but at the same time, I didn’t cause it, and it’s almost creating like this pressure, let me just say you’re not there to heal everyone. You’re a part of their healing journey, but you’re not their entire healing journey. So get some people around you that can help pray for you. Number one, get a prayer covering for you and for people who are healing. Number two, embrace the idea that professional counseling can play a role in this. Many pastors think that referring someone to professional counseling is an unloving thing to do. Like they’re coming to me for help, and if I send them somewhere else, it’s like I don’t love them. No, no. You can have pastoral conversations, but without the proper training, you’re not a counselor, and the most loving thing you can do is help get them to a counselor who can help walk them through some of these very specific and, quite frankly, kind of confusing concepts that sin causes in people’s lives. Then the last thing I would say is get a good theology when it comes to healing. In the church today, in my opinion, we often get split into two. We got miracle people and medicine people. The miracle people believe the medicine people have no faith, and the medicine people believe the miracle people have no brain. The reality is they both come from the Lord. God still does miracles. He still heals bodies. He still heals memories. He still heals conditions, trauma, and triggers. But God also works through medicine and all brilliance is his brilliance. That means the most brilliant researcher who came up with any drug we use came from God’s brilliance. So having a good measure to realize everybody’s not going to go on the same path, I don’t have to walk everybody through every step, and that I’m a part of this, but I’m not the whole measure of this, allows a pastor not to feel the pressure, which I think then allows them to respond to people who need to be healed in a much more empathetic and not defensive way.

Jason Daye
Joe, I absolutely love that you went to that position of pressure because we know that pastors and ministry leaders do feel that and they do sense that. That pressure can be debilitating in some ways and it can hinder the healing that we’re hoping to see come about. So thank you for taking us there. What are some other things that we need to consider as leaders in a local church, pastors, and ministry leaders, who are trying to create a space for that incremental healing, as you said, that God wants to do and longs to do in people’s lives? Are there some other things that we can lean into?

Joe Dobbins
Yeah, absolutely. I think most churches, one of the reasons they don’t see the healing they want, and again, I’m speaking of inner healing, mostly. The reason they don’t see the measure of it they do is because healing takes a process. Most of the time when we think about healing, we think about a response to a sermon, an altar call, or a moment of prayer with someone, and those things matter immensely, but they start a process. They’re not the total process. Many churches, when they approach healing, what it is is, well, I prayed with somebody at the end of the service, and I hope they’re better. Well, that’s like a surgical unit having no step-down. It’s like as soon as soon as the surgery is over, you get wheeled out. When the reality is, there’s a rehab process. There’s physical therapy. So churches, oftentimes, we start journeys, but we don’t have a process to carry them fully out. If I was saying, Well, what are the processes for people to have in their church? I think first of all, and I know this is going to sound odd, but make sure that your first impressions and your hospitality are the most loving expression they can possibly be. A lot of times, in church, we think of someone in the parking lot, a greeter, or something. We think of that as just like, oh, we just do that. It’s no big deal. That’s the first line of defense for someone who comes with lies that say this place is not loving. As someone is taking a step of faith to come back in church, the enemy is over time in their mind telling them, you’re going to be judged again, or you’re going to be mistreated again. When they are loved, overwhelmingly loved, not just like, hey, nice to see you, but I mean, there’s a genuine sense of hospitality and a love of Christ, it starts to fight the lies that the enemies planted as they approach coming back to church. So don’t overlook the first impression of your church. The second thing I would say is you have to get them back in personal relationships with other believers. This is maybe the toughest because chances are they got hurt by another believer, and so what they want to do is come in late and leave early. They don’t want to connect with people. They want to remain faceless and nameless. But here’s the problem with that. God delivers his best through people. If you look at almost all the spiritual gifts they’re delivered through people and trying to get something from God without being in relationship with other believers is like trying to get a package from Amazon without giving them your address, it’s just not going to happen. So creating, whether that’s home group, Sunday school classes, men’s ministry, women’s ministry, or whatever method you choose, but making sure that there is a genuine opportunity for relationship is going to be essential because most likely they’re going to heal as they receive healthy relationships. They’re going to heal from those unhealthy relationship experiences. Now, Jason, the third thing that I think I would encourage pastors to consider in this process is something that’s intentional to discipleship. Our brains are like hard drives designed by God to record everything our five senses ever experienced. The problem is they don’t differentiate between what’s true and what’s false. Our brain just records things as though it’s true. So that’s the space where the enemy often takes advantage of people and it creates lies within the wounds that they’ve experienced in local churches. So I think an intentional discipleship process, whether that’s a specific small group or it’s a class, however they want to do it, that’s fine, but there needs to be a moment where people take the lies they believe, things like, I’m less than, everything’s my fault, people don’t love me, or God doesn’t love me, and they need to hold it up against God’s word. There needs to be a moment where we go through these defeating thoughts, verse by verse. I think that what’s missing in a lot of churches is an opportunity for people to take not just their feelings of being hurt, but the lies of being hurt and having them be confronted. Could be through counseling or could be through pastoral conversations, but I think at some point we have to use God’s word like a scalpel to cut out, otherwise the infection continues to come back when the feelings have only been addressed. Then here’s the most important part and I think this is where sometimes we stop as believers. The last part of healing is that I then get in ministry. I start serving. We think healing is when the pain is relieved. God says healing is when the pain is redeemed. It’s when he uses our story of brokenness to help heal someone else’s story. That’s one of the stories that I tell in the book. In the introduction, I talk about a guy named Sam who came to our church and had been out of church for 15-plus years because of an awful kind of situation in his former church and he went on a healing journey. Today, Sam is an elder in our church, and that means he receives people for prayer at the end of every service. That’s what healing looks like. It’s when we don’t just stop the pain, but we find purpose out of it.

Jason Daye
Yeah, absolutely love that, Joe, and it’s so practical for us to think about, okay, how do we begin to create this space for healing? It’s very, very practical and very helpful, Joe. I love that. Now, as we’re talking to pastors and ministry leaders, one of the chapters you dedicate, you touched on this earlier as we were talking, was about when people are disappointed with leaders, right? So, I think it’d be good to kind of address that topic since we are all leaders. Talk to us a little bit about when church hurt is inflicted by the leaders themselves.

Joe Dobbins
Yeah, I’m glad you’re bringing this up because this is such an important conversation. As a matter of fact, when I did the series Hope After Church Hurt at our church, I actually did a whole message on disappointment with leaders. So it’s pretty odd for me to step into a space where I am the leader of these people, but I’m stepping up to give them what the Bible says about leaders that go awry as well. CS Lewis said, of all bad men, religious bad men are the worst, and that’s because we have an expectation that people who represent the Son of God would look like the Son of God. The problem with that is that sometimes they don’t. Sometimes we church leaders, all church leaders, fail. Some of them actually become predatory. Some of them misuse their power. I mean, this is a reality of our fallen nature. So one of the very first things that we have to recognize as leaders about the heart of our people is this. There is a natural drift from faith to flesh in every person who follows a leader. We start putting too much confidence in our leaders. People in my church put too much confidence in me. They start to listen to me a little too closely and think my word is the word of God. So one of the very first things I had to remind our church is that Jesus said, Follow me, not follow my followers. It’s so essential that we train the people who are under us to have a life-giving independent relationship with God from us. One of the things I pointed out to our churches is that if the only time you hear God is through my voice, something’s wrong. You should have a personal relationship, with the Scriptures, through prayer, you should hear God for yourself and not just hear God through me as a leader because I could disappoint you or let you down one day. If you’re someone who is a leader and maybe you’ve not had a moral failure or one of these really predatory behaviors, which is most leaders, I think when people come to you and say, I’ve been under something like that, I think two things that I’ve helped people is, first of all, I remind them that God understands. It wasn’t the peasants who killed Jesus, it was the people in charge. So Jesus understands what it’s like to be abused by leaders. He understands the pain they’re going through. He understands the challenges. Then the second thing I always remind them is that God is just. We can forgive because we know God is just. Psalm 56:8 says that God collects our tears. When a crime is committed, detectives come in and they go through a tedious process to preserve evidence. They make sure that justice can be served because they’ve collected everything that happened. Well, one day, I was reading that verse about God collecting our tears, and I thought to myself, I wonder if God’s collected our tears, not because it’s a trophy of pain, but instead, it’s evidence of what we went through because he’s able to serve justice from that evidence. I just think that when people know God sees, that God is just, and he understands, it helps them begin to have an openness to opening up to a new leader in that way. But there’s no doubt that as leaders, we’re gonna have to deal with the failures of other leaders and lead people through that.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s incredibly helpful, Joe, because if someone who’s been hurt by a leader is going to re-enter a church and start coming through that process, then we need to be sensitive to that pain that has been inflicted and again, not get defensive. But the idea is that it all kind of drives back to, Joe, what you talked earlier about authentic, true discipling that’s missing to a great degree, I think, in a lot of our churches. But that discipling, again, is so important in this piece because, again, we’re pointing people beyond placing their faith or trust in a pastor or ministry leader, but again, driving them back to the person of Jesus, which that whole discipling piece is peppered throughout, and I think, undergirds everything. It makes sense if we truly are going to try to help people overcome hurt in their lives and experience healing that comes through that deep, abiding relationship with Christ. So I absolutely love that. Joe, if pastors and ministry leaders who are watching or listening in, this resonates with them. They bumped into people. They know people. All of us probably have people that we know personally that are not engaged in church because of church hurt to some degree. They know people are coming in their doors maybe a little tentatively because of past hurt. What are some resources? Because I know you’ve put a lot of time, prayer, and energy into this, which I’m grateful for. What are some of those resources that can help local churches as we face this challenge and help people find healing?

Joe Dobbins
Well, I’m so glad you mentioned that, Jason, because I want to add value to any leader that’s listening today. If I could say this, number one, if you’re a leader in a local church and you could just be honest enough to say, I have some pain of my own. Let me just say, start there. The reality is, a lot of times the healing that we want to see in our churches is not happening because we as leaders are unhealed. In the book, I talk in many chapters about my own healing journey. I get very practical with the way the Lord took me through that. So I just want to say to the leader, don’t go to step two before step one takes place, which is, it doesn’t matter what you preach, what you hand out, or what structure you put in if you’re not healed. The Bible says we freely give of what we’ve received. Healing starts with the leader. So, if you’re here today, listening, and you’re hurting, can I just say, I give you permission to go to a therapist. I give you permission to talk to another pastor. Just permission to start your own healing journey. Then the second thing I would say is, I think that we’ve seen a lot of success from churches that open this subject up in their pulpits, in their messages. It’s almost like the elephant in the room, a little bit. It’s happening in the neighborhoods, but sometimes, as pastors, we don’t want to talk about it because we don’t want to bring more heat on ourselves for something we probably didn’t even do. But let me just say this, I’ve had countless churches that have chosen to do “hope after church hurt” as a series of messages or a teaching, and here’s what they found. People have come to them in droves and thanked them for having this conversation. I believe the book actually gives pastors a pro-church path through this topic. It is not an omen to deconstruction. It is not cheering on the idea that the church is messed up and God can’t use it. This is a pro-church book and it’s meant to heal and make your church stronger, not to deconstruct it. So let me just say I think the book gives you a path forward and if you really find that this is resonating, you would want to do it with your leadership team. You would want to do it with your group leaders, as small groups, or you’d like to do the series. We have resources for that. We have special rates so that you can buy the book in bulk. You can go to JoeDobbins.org and contact our office. We’ll be glad to help in any way we can. I want to add value and I think this is a good resource. We’re seeing a lot of people come to us and tell us that this is helping them address something that oftentimes gets forgotten.

Jason Daye
Yeah. Absolutely love not only the book, but the resources you put together, Joe, because it is a topic that is often avoided for just the reasons you shared because we’re like we need to have an intentional way to address the conversation, and you’ve done that. In Hope After Church Hurt, you’ve done that. So I’m very, very grateful for the resources you’ve put together. We’ll definitely have links in the toolkit for this episode that you can find at PastorServe.org/network. We’ll have links to the book, and to Joe’s site, which has the information on the resources for your local church if you want to use those, as well as the Ministry Leaders Growth Guide. All of the great things for you and your ministry team to dig into this very important topic that Joe has laid out for us. Now, Joe, as we wind down, I would like to give you an opportunity. You’re talking to your brothers and sisters who are serving on the front lines of ministry. What words of encouragement would you like to leave with them today?

Joe Dobbins
I would like to say this. God’s chosen you. Through the the tunnel of time, he looked and saw all of humanity, and could have chosen anyone to serve in this season and this is a unique season. Many of you are facing, you have just come through a season where you felt political pressure, there are social issues, and then there are addictions and theological debates. It just seems like for many of you, this has been the toughest time in your ministry, but I just want to say God chose you, and the fact that he chose you means that he’s graced you for this. The reality is he’s giving you the unique gifts that are needed and it is such an honor for us to serve him. But I also want you to know that he just has confidence in you. That you are in your community to bring the kingdom into that community and it’s an honor to serve with you. God just has a lot of confidence in you and that’s why he chose you.

Jason Daye
Awesome, brother. Great word. Joe, so grateful for the time we’ve had to share together. I’m grateful for the work you’ve done in Hope After Church Hurts and the resources you’ve created for local churches. A reminder for anyone who wants to find the book, find all those resources, as well as the toolkit, go to PastorServe.org/network and download all of it right there. Joe, thank you for making the time to be with us on FrontStage BackStage.

Joe Dobbins
Thank you for all you’re doing to resource and support pastors. Jason, you guys are a gift, and I really appreciate the time today.

Jason Daye
Thank you, brother. God bless.

Jason Daye
Now, before you go, I want to remind you of an incredible free resource that our team puts together every single week to help you and your team dig more deeply and maximize the conversation that we just had. This is the weekly toolkit that we provide. And we understand that it’s one thing to listen or watch an episode, but it’s something entirely different to actually take what you’ve heard, what you’ve watched, what you’ve seen, and apply it to your life and to your ministry. You see, FrontStage BackStage is more than just a podcast or YouTube show about ministry leadership, we are a complete resource to help train you and your entire ministry team as you seek to grow and develop in life in ministry. Every single week, we provide a weekly toolkit which has all types of tools in it to help you do just that. Now you can find this at PastorServe.org/network. That’s PastorServe.org/network. And there you will find all of our shows, all of our episodes and all of our weekly toolkits. Now inside the toolkit are several tools including video links and audio links for you to share with your team. There are resource links to different resources and tools that were mentioned in the conversation, and several other tools, but the greatest thing is the ministry leaders growth guide. Our team pulls key insights and concepts from every conversation with our amazing guests. And then we also create engaging questions for you and your team to consider and process, providing space for you to reflect on how that episode’s topic relates to your unique context, at your local church, in your ministry and in your life. Now you can use these questions in your regular staff meetings to guide your conversation as you invest in the growth of your ministry leaders. You can find the weekly toolkit at PastorServe.org/network We encourage you to check out that free resource. Until next time, I’m Jason Daye encouraging you to love well, live well, and lead well. God bless.