Lead Time
Lead Time
Unlocking the Power of Specialized Roles in Ministry with Vince Parks
Unlock the secret to effective church leadership with insights from Vince Parks, one of the few ordained executive pastors in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. Our conversation reveals how specialized roles like the executive pastor can transform a congregation by focusing on operations, systems, and strategy, thereby allowing traditional pastors to concentrate on spiritual guidance. Vince shares his journey and expertise, shedding light on the biblical basis for these roles and how different gifts within a congregation can complement each other for greater kingdom impact.
Ever felt the pressure to be "Superman" in ministry? Vince opens up about the immense challenges that LCMS pastors face, especially fresh seminary graduates who are expected to be generalists. Drawing from his own experience managing a large church staff, Vince shares valuable strategies for balancing pastoral duties with effective staff leadership and development. He emphasizes the importance of fostering a collaborative environment and continuously recruiting to build a strong, supportive church community.
Cultivating a healthy organizational culture is crucial, and Vince discusses how leaders can set the tone by addressing both positive and negative behaviors. We explore strategic systems for church leadership, including team design, governance models, and the often unseen structures that keep a church running smoothly. The conversation also tackles the urgent need to expand training pipelines for LCMS workers, ensuring that church leadership remains accessible and effective in various economic contexts. Tune in for a wealth of insights and practical strategies that can elevate your approach to church leadership.
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Speaker 2:Welcome to Lead Time, tim Allman here. Jack Kauberg is away actually learning with another congregation in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. So today it's just me getting to hang out with one of probably the only, if not the only, ordained executive pastor in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. His name is Vince Parks, serving the last three years with my friend Tim Neekirk at Salem in Tomball, texas. Isn't that right? Are you in Tomball?
Speaker 3:Tomball Texas.
Speaker 2:That's northwest Houston, yeah, beautiful. So Vince has quite the experience, from being a SMP student to getting his master's in theology we were just talking about that, one of the first SMP cohorts a number of years ago and he served in congregations as well as a director with Link and now again the last three years at Salem. So let's get into the conversation, vince, about having an executive. Maybe there's not too many executive pastors per se that have your main story, but I'll speak for the benefit.
Speaker 2:In my world of man, the last 11 years, having a Jack Kauberg, who's executive director of finance operations, kind of systems structure strategy, just moving kind of vision to execution, that's kind of his main job and he even moves into a lot of our discipleship systems and all of that. It's pretty powerful. We don't have a way actually in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod today to recognize really. It's another way to understand and if Jack were here I'm putting on my Jack hat right. Another way to understand the role of deacons, maybe the servants, those that are in line with Stephen and the others who are called to take the apostles' ministry and you're kind of a hybrid because you are ordained but take the apostles' ministry down to the grassroots, to serve God's people and to multiply disciples. So what case would you make for congregations of varying sizes having an executive pastor? Slash executive director Vince. Thanks for hanging out, man, this is gonna be fun.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, and thanks for the invite, Tim. I enjoy it. I've actually kind of been on both sides of the executive office. I've been in a lay executive director for a number of years. That's how I started down at Gloria Day in Nassau Bay under John Kieschnick's tutelage and then eventually, you know, SMP and the seminary and all that other kind of stuff moved to the ordained side of the roster.
Speaker 3:I guess you'd say you know, the case is really all about giftedness, right. I mean, I know a ton of highly talented, really super gifted pastors. Our synod is full of them, right, and we got a lot of guys out there that are really great at what pastors are primarily called to do. But the issue really, regardless of the size of the church, is how you're going to use the giftedness of that particular individual right and how can you maximize that for kingdom impact. There are guys, for example, I serve with, Tim Niekerk.
Speaker 3:Well, part of Tim Niekerk's background. For a little while he was a home builder, right. So when we actually talk about building something around here, Tim's like trying to figure out if the concrete mix is right. Right, Because I mean he just like loves to get to that level of detail. But on an ongoing, week to week basis. Right, he can't be that far into operations, that far into systems and still doing what he's called to do Preach the word, Vision, the congregation frankly raise a lot of money, particularly in a congregation this size. So I think, at any size congregation really it's. It's about giftedness, it's maximizing the human resources that you have for the kingdom.
Speaker 2:It's about giftedness, it's maximizing the human resources that you have for the kingdom. What biblical case would you make for the gifts and these are gifts that we often don't talk about. I would say the gift of leadership and the gift of strategy, the gift of generosity. There are. The gift of now this isn't a spiritual gift per se, but the gift of creativity, though our God is very creative, right the gift of entrepreneurship. A lot of times we don't talk about those gifts, the gifts of being an excellent businessman or businesswoman and raising a lot of money so that they can give. They have the gift of generosity so they can give liberally, freely, to the expansion of the gospel. What other biblical cases do you make that says those that have the gift of systems and strategy should be more highlighted within the local congregation.
Speaker 3:Any thoughts there. Yeah, well, we see so many instances, right. I mean, jesus never sent out one, he sent out two. There's probably a reason for that. There are reasons why everyone needs that encourager, everybody needs that challenger. We see those in Scripture, right. We see the folks that are going to serve, the folks that are going to wait on tables, right, and support the apostolic gifts in those ways and support the apostolic gifts in those ways.
Speaker 3:And it's not to say that the other pastors here or the other staff here don't have any of those gifts necessarily, right, it's really a matter of how can we maximize the gifts that we have. For the kingdom Example I can preach, I love to preach, I preach. Maybe, I don't know, I might preach eight or ten times a year and that's just fine. It's not my main gig, I don't derive my self-worth from that, right. And we've got a discipleship pastor who's Jason, he's so gifted and he's he can lean into that, because I'm worried I'm taking care of systems that are giving him the time to do that Same thing with Tim, right. So, yeah, I think it's about not saying gifts are exclusive as much as it is. How are they complimentary and how do we maximize them?
Speaker 2:Amen. One of the struggles today that we've noticed in the LCMS is it's kind of pastor and then everyone else, you know, and the ULC kind of exists to say oh, there's a lot of other gifts to equip the priesthood of all believers. Ephesians 4. Why do you think the LCMS has struggled to actively recognize the benefits of, say, an executive director, or even the role of deacon? Right, I mean, we got rid of the role of deacon at the Synod Convention almost 10 years ago now. What are your thoughts there? Why have we struggled?
Speaker 3:So I'm not a lifelong Lutheran. I was actually raised in a very faith-filled Catholic family and came up that whole system right. And it's interesting when I first, when my wife and I converted to the Lutheran church, that faith, at Gloria Day some years ago, that church was, I don't know, maybe 3,000 on the membership rolls at the time and that was actually the smallest church we had ever been part of, because we both grew up Catholic right. So the church we were married in was 3,600 families. There was one priest, one who was also responsible for basically one thing Sacraments. Everything else was handled elsewhere, right by multiple gifts, multiple staff, multiple people. He did have some deacons, by the way, but it was very clear that that's what he did right In the LCMS.
Speaker 3:Think about how we train pastors, lcms. Think about how we train pastors. We train them to be theological thinkers and by and large, because we are a denomination of smaller churches, we tend to train guys to be generalists. So I think a number of guys and I've worked with some guys that are fresh out good guys, but there's a little bit of coming out of the sem with an S on their chest that they think stands for Superman, because we've trained them to go in there and they're it Right and in many places they will be it. You know, that's all that they it to have an S on his chest and be able to make sure that the buildings are well maintained and law and gospel are properly preached and sacraments are taught to the kids and the budget balanced and all of those other things. I think our people have been trained to expect that of us and that's a great challenge. I think it actually is a growth barrier for a lot of our churches.
Speaker 2:Well, I couldn't agree more. It definitely is, and I don't know if that's something that's taught as much as caught.
Speaker 2:I don't ever remember hearing a professor to be generous here saying, hey, you're going to go in and you're going to kind of do everything, all right. But I think the way formation takes place it leads them to think, well, I'm getting all because I do practical theology Right, and then I do systematic and history and exegetical et cetera, like I'm well we use this term a lot Right, I'm well formed, I've been well formed, so it's easy to kind of catch the drift that hey, I'm well, we use this term a lot, right, I'm well formed, I've been well formed, so it's easy to kind of catch the drift that hey, I'm going to go in and kind of do the thing. The hard part is, if we keep reading the Bible, power at Pentecost to go and do likewise. And you have to see in the early church this kind of robust I'm just going to go to the Apostle Paul.
Speaker 2:I've been reading, I read through the book of Acts kind of system. I mean consistently always just reading through. And Paul is so well networked right, and he's always talking about hey, timothy, and, and stand up. He mentions a number of guys at the end of first Corinthians. I'm not pulling their name right now because it's like the only time they're mentioned. But he is networked to all of these different leaders in different locations and it appears as if they have a second Timothy two two mentality, that they're finding others who can teach, who can find others who can, who can teach. And then, obviously, the biggest thing, as you look at the pastoral epistles, is the character of Christ right, humility, kindness, the fruit of the spirit. Anything to add to that Vince?
Speaker 3:Sure, well, he keeps obviously the uh, the centrality of Christ right, and Paul's also the ultimate contextual guy. For sure, he figures out what needs to be done to reach a group of people in a particular context. Right, we know he uses their songs, he uses their stories, he figures out how to relate to those folks, but how to do ministry in the context that he is actually trying to reach, yeah, and I think that kind of flexibility we have to get more. Okay with that.
Speaker 2:So tell us, let's dig back into your story, your context, right now. What do you do, vince? Give us, like the normal everyday you know what does your call look like, because it's probably different than a lot of other call and ordain servants of the word, because it's probably different than a lot of other called and ordained servants of the word.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I do serve a relatively large church with a relatively large staff and a school and a preschool Right. So we've been around here for 173 years, praise God, we are blessed with an amazingly beautiful campus. We have well over 100 acres of land here. We have graves in our cemetery that are pre-Civil War graves, so there's all kinds of history here. Right, that's been a learning curve for me, because I have never served a seven generation church before and I do have some folks occasionally remind me that they are seventh generation here and I'm not, you know. So they're all great, great folks. But what does it actually look like? It is a large staff, so I'm cramming to get ready for next week's all staff meeting, the one that kicks off the year. There'll be 108 people in that meeting, so that would be the preschool staff, the school faculty and the church staff. Some of the part-time contractors won't be able to make that, so it's a little over a hundred people, I would say.
Speaker 3:In almost any given day, probably half of what I do is related to staff leadership, staff management, staff development. In a staff that size. You're always recruiting for somebody. That's right. I did spend my first year out of college in executive recruiting for a Fortune 500 company and I find myself occasionally pulling things out from way back there going oh yeah, we're going to use that. Right now there's two key program level positions vacant here that we're recruiting for, so you're always looking for somebody. Half my time is related to staff development, staff management, staff leadership, working with my direct reports we call it the directional leadership team, which is a young group here by and large and doing a great job, but I'm also mentoring some of them in leading the amount of staff that they now have. We have a new, for example. We have a new director level person on the DLT who has never managed any staff before and he now has a department of six people. They're just training and coaching and building him up and how he reacts with or how he interacts with his people.
Speaker 3:So I think about half my call is that no-transcript. Probably. Let's say that's 75 percent. I preach that. You know, that's maybe 10 percent of my time getting ready to preach something or getting ready to teach in some environment, maybe teaching in a new member class or something like that, and then I spend probably about 10 percent of my time at very high level strategic stuff with our board. In my first year here we changed from a structure where there are about five different functioning boards to one governing board. We passed the new constitution and new bylaws in the first 12 months that I was here. I'll give my people a big kudo on that. We passed it with about a 97% affirmative vote, so they were very supportive. So I spent about 10, 15% of my time walking very closely with Tim, the lead pastor really lockstep. That's critical as we interact with the governing board and high-level strategy. We're heading into a capital campaign here. We're heading into a major building program.
Speaker 3:So, that planning is a significant part of my time, that planning is a significant part of my time.
Speaker 2:There are very few people that understand the complexity. It's just a different type of call and I think a lot of folks listen to a conversation like this and they come up with these preconceived notions that man, you big church guys, somehow you're compromising, you're not a real pastor because your day in and day out just looks very different than you know, visiting shut-ins and care, which I know. You have folks that do all of those things, even in a large congregation, to be sure. So what do you say to folks that kind of have negative, preconceived notions of larger church ministry and kind of denigrate the Salem's of of the world and the glory of days? I think Christ greenfields, to be honest, yeah, sure.
Speaker 3:Sure, typically what I let them know is that you know we are is true to the gospel and the confessions and what we are called and committed to be true to is anybody, regardless of size.
Speaker 3:It's just how we get it done has to look a little different and as a pastor so when I have pastors ask me that question, I'm going to be helping out a church over in another part of Texas here in a couple of weeks.
Speaker 3:Is they're approaching, beginning to prepare for a senior pastor transition and they've asked me to come in and talk to them. The last time they called a senior pastor, they were a church with about 100 folks in worship. This time that they're going to call a senior pastor, they're a church with about 400 folks in worship and they realize they're not looking to call that guy right, they need to call this guy who's going to lead them into the next season. So sometimes I'll even share like with a church that size you're beginning to look for a pastor who is perhaps not going to be doing as much as he is going to be assuring that it's getting done Right, and that's a little hard for folks sometimes to make that transition, particularly if they're close with that pastor or they come out of a smaller church system. But once you get to you know 200, 250, maybe 300 in worship. Pastors have to make sure certain things are getting done, not necessarily doing them all.
Speaker 2:Amen. Well, that necessitates development of people and teams and, frankly, it gets done better. I'll just be that bold to say the spiritual care, when it's not all dependent upon me or upon you or Tim or whoever. The spiritual care flowing down from the pastoral office given to those who have the gifts, like our, our spiritual care team is way more robust than it was when I first came here. People are getting seen like every single week. There's a touch point for our homebound, you know, and things so, but it it requires the lead pastor and that kind of lead team to have a development mindset rather than a doing mindset. We say here like we're not hiring anybody to do ministry, we're hiring people to develop, equip the priesthood of all believers to execute ministry. Anything more to say there about development on a team?
Speaker 3:Well, it's, it's it's absolutely critical, right, and the sometimes the hardest step is for us to realize we are not the best person at everything.
Speaker 3:Yeah, right, Even though we have been called and ordained, right, you know, I'm OK with the fact that I'm probably not the best guy to go sit in somebody's and hold somebody's hand in the hospital for a period of time.
Speaker 3:There's probably other people that are a little more naturally relational in that place, maybe a little better on the prayer ministry side of things or whatever might have to happen in that setting. And will I still go do hospital visits? Yeah, absolutely, particularly if it's someone in the congregation, I know, or it's someone at leadership level, right. But I also know, like you just said, there's a robust team of people who are gifted to go do that. And I had to get to the spot where I understood if I try to and I try to put in all the miles right and hit every hospital in the medical center, I'm actually taking ministry opportunities away from gifted lay people or other pastors or whatever to do those kinds of ministries, which is probably kind of arrogant on my part, right. So you have to be okay with giving ministry away to people you have equipped to do that ministry well.
Speaker 2:Well, it's a major culture shift, major culture shift, especially in a lot of our LCMS. Be okay with giving ministry away to people you have equipped to do that ministry well. Well, it's a major culture shift, major culture shift, especially in a lot of our LCMS congregations. So let's talk about culture. It's a word that gets thrown out so much, and you've worked with a lot of churches, so have we. When you're trying to define a healthy culture, what are three kind of words of wisdom?
Speaker 2:You're like man we need to get this right or everything else is going to be a moot point. What are your thoughts there?
Speaker 3:Well it is. It's critically important. I think it it might've been Drucker Any one of one of those guys who wrote a lot of books right Might've been Drucker said culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 3:Those things are what creates culture. So one of the things that does not go well with me is the church, what I call the church shoulder shrug, right? So if there is a behavior that's going on in the congregation, in the staff in some way, and you begin to go, hey, what's up with Leonard? I mean the way he's leading that usher team this Sunday, that just what's up with Leonard. I mean the way he's leading that usher team this Sunday, that just what's going on there. If what I get back is a shrug oh, that's just Leonard, that's how he does it. No, right, If we just tolerate that behavior, it's actually creating a culture in that usher team or whatever the example might be right. So we have to be sure we're rewarding and celebrating the things we want to see in culture and we have to confront the things we don't want to see. So those two things are essential.
Speaker 2:I agree, I agree wholeheartedly. The way we talk about it here is the rate at which we can have the difficult conversation. To get to confession, to get to absolution is a primary indicator of the health of our ministry, anything more to say there around the difficult conversations and how you train leaders toward that, because the shoulder shrug. What we allow to happen is like it's not worth it. Leonard Leonard's kind of a jerk and he's going to jump all over me if I come and talk to Leonard. So say more about difficult conversations.
Speaker 3:Well, the difficult conversations have to start with the leader. So a minute ago you asked me about keywords with culture and I was going to give you three.
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 3:Yeah, one is leader, ok. Second one's approach and the third one's crucible it has to start with the leader. The leader's got to inspire the confidence. So the leader has to be willing to have those difficult conversations in a God honoring way, yes, and then be willing to model that consistently so that your people see that. Right. Hopefully the leader is a person with relatively high emotional IQ, right, so they can head into those conversations. They have to be able to listen with empathy to what's going on and and why that occurred the way it happened. And they have to be able to listen with empathy to what's going on and and why that occurred the way it happened. And they have to, you know, still care for the individual, right, but can't back away from the difficult conversation. For the sake of the church, for the sake of the saints, for the sake of the ministry, you have to have those conversations.
Speaker 2:Can that pause? On leaders For sure, I mean going back to the Apostle Paul. How many difficult things does he say? To the church in Corinth, I mean First Corinthians. We just walked through it. It's crazy how courageous he is to deal with some really messy stuff. Anything more to add there Vince.
Speaker 3:You know, I think there was a meme floating around for a while there that said, if Paul saw the American church, we'd be getting a letter. He's a great model there. You know, we were talking about his as an apostolic leader, as a contextual leader, but also one who was not afraid to shy away from difficult conversations. So you have to do it. I tend to do it more privately than publicly whenever possible, right. But at the same time, sometimes you are bringing along your Timothy right For that difficult conversation, or embedding the Timothy in the preparation for the conversation, and then debrief, if it has, if it still has to be held one-on-one, privately, you may be bringing up the leader that you're mentoring, the Timothy I'm calling him right and debriefing what happened with Leonard, with Timothy as a developmental exercise.
Speaker 2:The hard thing about leadership Vince.
Speaker 2:Well, there's a number of hard things, but specifically in a senior leadership role and in our because we have policy governance here, right. So high trust, high accountability. Um, shout out to Paul Zills, who's worked with us now for six years or so our constitution over over. Right, I have to live with the fact that, again, it's a spirit at work within me, the spirit at work with within us, within the church.
Speaker 2:Um, but very practically, day to day, I either cause or allow things to happen, right, and I think there's more, there's more, um, fear on my part about allowing certain things to happen than there is even about causing things to happen like I vision and things like, you know, the future. A lot of that just kind of oozes out of me and out of us as a ministry organization, all of these ideas. But then, as we continue to grow and or, you know, create new things, new gospel expressions, it really is monitoring what I'm allowing rather than causing consistently, and that requires ruthless honesty, right, and I think I'm probably in, I don't know, two to three people would say I don't really want to enter into that conversation. A week, you know around a variety of different things, and the quicker I can get after it Jack is the same way just the better it goes right. So talk about the leader causing and or allowing things to happen.
Speaker 3:Well, the leader can cause things to happen by modeling, by dripping vision, by empowering and you know, engaging people and empowering them to do certain things. You can certainly do that. Um, we, we tend to try to focus that in a positive direction. Right, when you're allowing things to happen, you're tolerating the shoulder shrug. You can certainly let things go off the cliff, um, and you don't. You're going to pay for it later, so just deal with it now, right, but I think a key thing there too, it's it's kind of the a critical piece of the leader's approach. So I told you, a leader approach, crucible. I'm shifting a little bit. The leader also has to be able to publicly own his own mistakes. Yes, in front of those people, right, you have to say, man, I screwed up on that one and it's on me. I called the play wrong, play Right. I mean, a coach that can do that, that's a great coach, right? We've seen. We've seen examples of that. I actually wrote this one down. I used it as a staff illustration because I couldn't remember the game Clemson was playing Miami. Clemson's leading 21-10. They're on fourth.
Speaker 3:Dabo Swinney could have been happy with that, gone into the locker room and said he calls some harebrained play. They blow it. There's a 61-yard return. They lose the game. What is the first thing he said to ABC News? I actually found the clip. My mistake, yeah for sure. Right, they're saying what are you going to the locker room and telling the guys? I'm telling the guys I screwed up, that's on me, it was my mistake. Right, he was going for the glory. He blew. It Could have been happy. Leaders have to own it. Right, we have to be. We don't want our people doing the shrug about us. Oh, that says Pastor Tim. He goes off on these hair, hair, brain ideas, hair, harebrained ideas. And that one just blew up and hurt some people or cost us some money or whatever the case might be. So we got to be willing to willing to own it as well. Can you give an example?
Speaker 2:in your life and I mean I'll start, I'll start first. Sometimes I'll come into meetings and maybe I'm not prepared as well as I should be, or or I'm distracted because something is going on and I've found that the quicker.
Speaker 2:I just say that to the team like I don't know and or I'm dealing with something at home or whatever, like there's way more compassion from the team than if I were to come in and just like pretend that the elephant's not in the room, which is my lack of attention or, um yeah, my distraction. So any any thoughts there for you and how, how you approach sharing and confessing when you're struggling?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. Um, in my main conference room that the DLT, my directional leadership team, meets in, there's a two-year calendar hanging on the wall One of these ginormous magnetic things. Right, there's a two-year calendar out there and I am known for driving deadlines around here. Okay, and I don't like to let the deadline slip. I just don't. Okay.
Speaker 3:Now, we recently had a hurricane. Okay, there was no power on this campus, there was no internet, not only on this campus for a week, but most of our staff also had no power, no internet. And I'm coming into the next DLT meeting and I'm apologizing left and right for deadlines that I'm not going to hit because we lost a week of work. It took other people around me, trusted people, to go. You know, hey, vince, geez, cut yourself a break. You know, I mean the whole community had no power, right, and it was actually another learning moment for me too.
Speaker 3:Notice, the lights are flickering now we're still having power issues around here, but I have to be willing to say to that group you know, I really thought today we were going to finish talking about this project or we were beginning begin talking about this new initiative. I didn't get the prep work done to have a good conversation about that initiative. So if you were prepared for it, I'm sorry I didn't get us to a spot where I'm prepared for it or we're all prepared for it. We're going to reschedule it for two weeks from now or whatever we need to do.
Speaker 3:No, that's helpful Just being willing to be honest with that group of people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it just builds so much trust when we're honest. So let's talk. Let's talk systems a bit. What is a church system and why should?
Speaker 3:churches care about a system at all systems approach. Well, every church has them, regardless of size. You could pretend you don't, but you do. There's five. In my experience.
Speaker 2:There's five systems in every church, regardless of size. Let's go. Okay, so I'm going to school. I'm going to school right now. I'm taking notes. Let's go.
Speaker 3:Write it down no extra charge. I'll send you a slide. First one clergy leadership roles. Okay. Okay, they will vary from church to church. They'll vary with the size and the scale of the ministry. We've talked about that a little bit. Um, there's three of us here, uh, clergy plus some retire guys that hang out around here. A little bit, um, we have different roles, right, but making sure that there's clarity around clergy leadership roles, whatever they are, and there's a system for that.
Speaker 3:The second one is staff team design and function. There's different ways to design your staff. I mean that's, we can talk about that for a long time. It might be a direct connection to various strategic discipleship environments that you have various strategic discipleship environments that you have. It might be like in my area, a lot of staff design has to do with the preschool, the school, the church, how they relate, right. I have some staff that move this way, some other staff that kind of move this way, right? So, staff team design and function you have one, regardless of the size of the church, I'd say.
Speaker 3:The third one is whatever your governance model is. So not just policy-based governance. Delighted to hear your policy base. I'm a big fan. I was trained by Miriam Carver years ago John Carver's wife, who's much more interesting than he is. He wrote the book. She did the training. It was much better that way.
Speaker 3:But whatever that governance and board function or system that you have, whatever that is I'm not going to pitch any one of them right now, but you've got some kind of system at play there in your church Right. Also, underneath that one there's kind of the unseen leadership structure which, depending on the size of the church, might be the lay leader or staff leader of a significant ministry area Right. I once served, I once was acquainted with a church where really probably the most the person on staff who probably had the strongest leadership quotient, was the choir director just a naturally gifted leader and, as a result, the choir and then the extended music ministry. We're actually kind of a influential power center in the church Right, and I mean that in a positive way. I mean it's like if you wanted to get something done, ask the choir you know, off they go.
Speaker 3:So whatever that governance and board function is role of the laity. You know, acculturation how are the guests identified? How do they get assimilated? Who's going to guide them? Who's going to help them navigate the church system, whatever it is? So that's a fourth system. Fifth one is forming and executing strategy. So where does that happen? Probably with the pastor and something, maybe a governing board, maybe a elder group, ministry, action teams I mean, there's a variety of it could be staff. You could be set up so that the staff is responsible for forming and executing strategy and the board is just kind of overseeing the results. So those five systems I just gave you. There's great latitude and variety within each one of them, but every church has those five things going on.
Speaker 2:Absolutely agree. I'm really curious about your unseen leadership structure. You kind of mentioned that after the governance model, the third system, how does it connect? After the governance model, the third system?
Speaker 2:How does it connect to the governance model? Just go a little bit deeper. There Are we talking opinion leaders, that a lot of them are in non-organized leadership roles, but every church has a grandma Rita, you know, and if grandma Rita is in there or a group of, I would say, mostly older adults, unless those opinion leaders kind of come alongside, or heard of forums given for them to express their you better make what is unseen seen. Hopefully you see them Go ahead. Yeah, anything more there.
Speaker 3:No, when I came to Salem I sat down with Wayne Grauman for lunch. He'd been the senior pastor here for 36 years and I said what's the best piece of advice you give the new pastor? And he said don't be unaware of the networks that you cannot even see. And in a seven generation church, yeah, there's plenty of them. But I think in any church, like you said, there's some thought leaders, there's some influential folks, Particularly if they do have some longevity. To them, they may have more of a direct connection to your governance structure or your board structure than to staff or other ministry leaders. So you just have to. It's not necessarily a bad thing. You just have to be aware of it and looking at how you are leading and bringing people along. Does that make?
Speaker 2:sense? Yeah, it does, and I would say it just is. If the church has any size at all, they're going to be there, and the quicker I get close to those folks, listen to them, love them. It's very unwise for any pastor to come into a congregation and disregard the long time members who have poured resources, time, energy et cetera into that ministry. I have heard of stories of pastors just kind of saying eh, it's not that big of a deal to get connected to them. Maybe the initial perception is that they're closed off. They, you know, don't care about mission or something like that. I found that to be very, very short-sighted and can do serious damage to the pastor's reputation and longevity there in a congregation. Isn't that true?
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, my observation is those folks so maybe a little bit newer pastor comes into a congregation little system, newer pastor comes into a congregation little system. Folks who have been there for a while, they are more well, they are more connected to things that the pastor is not connected to yet. They love the place, they think the sanctuary is beautiful, they love more people there because they know more people there. They've been attached to programs that might still be going on or programs that existed 10 years ago and don't exist anymore, you don't know. But they are attached to things that that new pastor hasn't even had the opportunity to get attached, become aware of, let alone get attached to.
Speaker 2:Right, right, no, that's good, we're coming down the homestretch here. Vince, this is great. Let's talk about formation Going kind of last question there. You care deeply about strategy in the ULC.
Speaker 2:In these podcasts we talk a lot about our need for more lcms workers, teachers, administrators, dces, pastors as you put on your kind of systems hat, how would you go about meeting this, meeting this need, because it is a profound need. Over 700 pulpits, not uh, church is not having pastors right now and from Synod and Convention, a pretty robust and it's unfortunate that we're not listening to one another as well as we could, from our seminaries down to the churches looking like ours to multiply disciples and start new ministries. That chasm, unfortunately, is not narrowing, it's widening. And anybody that disagrees with some of the things I and we have said about different ways we could approach this challenge. You are more than welcome to send me an email, tallman at cglchurch, and get on the podcast and have a disagree-agreeably conversation, but I don't see a lot of those creative conversations taking place right now. So, from a systems perspective, how would you go about meeting the church worker shortage place right now? So, from a systems perspective, how would you go about meeting the church worker shortage. Need right now Vince.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3:Well, it's a simple question. It was a simple question, somebody would have solved it. I think there's two things. There's we need greater capacity in the pipelines that we have and we need greater velocity. So I'm not an engineer, so I'm not sure that even like computes and doesn't explode, but I think the pipelines that we have need to be larger. So we need greater capacity for people to be trained and we need to be able to train them a little more quickly than we currently are, again for the sake of the church. So I would say capacity and then velocity. We need to form more workers more quickly than we have recently.
Speaker 3:From a candidate's perspective, I think the issue is accessibility. So I think there are many, many people out there who have a heart and maybe a Holy Spirit prompting that would get them leaning into ministry in a significant, recognizable way by our church body with good training. But it's got to be accessible. Stetzer was speaking once to a Texas district gathering, ed Stetzer, and he said you know, the thing with the LCMS is you have beautiful theology, you have this rich history, you have all these wonderful things. You're like the world's best whole food supermarket and it's all on the shelves and it's beautifully displayed and it smells good and it's fresh and it's fantastic and it's life giving and it's just like wow. The only problem is you only open two checkout lanes, one's in St Louis and one's in Fort Wayne.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Right Now. Let's just expand that a little bit more. Well, what about all the other offices? Right? I mean, what about DCEs and DPMs and other church workers, right? So, synod Inc.
Speaker 3:I get frustrated with Synod Inc. I'll say that when they say things, I hear people say things like well, we have plenty of routes to the pastoral office. You know, we've got residential, we've got residential alternate, we've got SMP, we've got EIIT, we've got CMC, we've got CHS, the Hispanic Center, right, I mean, we've got all these things. Okay, well then, holistically, let's look at all these things and figure out how to make all of them affordable and make all of them accessible, right?
Speaker 3:So, if you go be a resident student on the traditional MDiv program, 100% scholarship, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, yeah, what about the guy who's painting houses for a living and is, or is, an hourly worker in Houston, texas, who's willing to go up to CHS and study and everything else? Why aren't we making it affordable for him to not only engage in that but also recognize the fact that every time we pull him out of his family and his context and his business and send them to wherever we send them to or ask them to go to, we're also creating an economic hardship here for his family. So how do we do that? Some of the stuff that you've been spearheading I'm so happy that you're doing with Lutheran House of Studies and some of those kind of folks, because I think there's some real practical applications there that we can lean into. How do we holistically make routes accessible, affordable, increase the bandwidth so we can get more people into them? I'm not sure that anyone in Synod is taking that broad, holistic look at that and I think, we need to.
Speaker 2:Well, there's a lot at stake, right?
Speaker 3:Yes, there is.
Speaker 2:So the empathy in the conversation is I want to know what you believe, I want to know the information by which you came to your belief, for instance, that residential is the gold standard, et cetera. If you're open, I would share, probably, a different perspective, and then I'm also going to recognize, and hopefully you would as well, that there's a lot at stake, both for those in higher ed you know you're stealing students our pipeline is not going to be as robust. So, and then there's a lot at stake for us because we, at the local level I mean we have visions to start new churches and the accessibility and the speed at which we can train up leaders all under authority, by the way, still under the authority of those that have been seasoned in the pastoral office, connected throughout their journey, and I would say they should be connected even after ordination. We need one another.
Speaker 2:The older pastors need to stay in the game, if you will, with younger pastors, but there's just not that. And this goes back to system. There's just not that. And this goes back to system. There's just not local levels, especially in saltwater districts, where our contexts are very, very diverse, for us to solve this problem together. That mechanism of connecting has not been established, and so we're just becoming more and more tribal. Anything more to say there, vince?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, and it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, tim, about culture and leadership behaviors. Right, it really does. This is a cultural issue. We have to learn how to hold our leaders accountable, to have those difficult conversations, and the difficult conversations that we are facing are around things like formation. They are around things like missiology, more so than bickering about ecclesiology. Yeah, yeah, right, I mean we have to do that. We need leaders who are willing to step into relationships with a guy that maybe I'm not sure I like that guy necessarily, or I read what he wrote about something on a certain blog, I don't know. But we've got to. Our leaders must, for the sake of the church, step into those difficult conversations and those cultural spots that are a little bit right, a little bit messy, and figure out how to get this stuff done.
Speaker 2:I was. I was listening to a podcast recently and man, now Vince, I really want to pull it up because I got to attribute this. But anyway, this brother pastor who's now with the Lord, he, uh, he probably got it from somewhere else anyhow, but he, he said this was in a lecture from 1995. He was speaking at some some pastor's conference or something and and, uh, he was, he was assessing why do Lutherans kind of struggled to engage and even at that time, why do pastors bicker with one another, not commune with one another, circuits kind of not get along and this guy goes.
Speaker 2:You know, lutherans are a lot like manure and I'm like what? Lutherans are? A lot like manure, and he was speaking in agrarian culture, right, he goes. If you put a lot of manure in one place, it burns the grass. Lutherans need to be spread out to fertilize, to fertilize, uh and, and then he goes, and then he goes.
Speaker 2:Well, you should look, you should look at the edges of the united states of america, and there on the edges you're going to find lutherans who still hold to our confessions, hold to scripture. I don't know where this guy was from, he had a funky accent anyway. That's why I'm saying this um, and, and he goes there, you're going to find those that are really trying to put their Lutheran identity into practice, ecumenically and with brothers in different contexts, especially, especially, in our saltwater districts, and so I just, I just think that's true A lot of times. If you're listening to this and you're in the Midwest, I'm not denigrating you, shaming you at all, not denigrating you, shaming you at all. We have a lot of churches in the Midwest and the conversations that you're having in your circuits are different than the conversations we're having in our urban and suburban greatly growing urban context. Right now, they're just different, and that's okay.
Speaker 2:So let's spread out, let's spread out, let's cast out, let's send out in love. Anything more to say on that as we close here. Vince, this has been fun. No, really really.
Speaker 3:And it's not like you just said, the the number of vacant pulpits right now is not just a saltwater issue. I mean, you look at the, look at the statistics. What's happening and the pinch is going to it's already being felt everywhere at what's happening and the pinch is going to it's already being felt everywhere. But uh, yeah, for the sake of the church, we we've got to get that done A broad-based, holistic approach at all the possible training tools that are out there. Right, we're trying to form guys using the eight box of Crayola crayons instead of the 64 box of Crayola crayons right, but didn't God give us 64 cranes and a Crayola box, right?
Speaker 3:I mean, that's, I think. So I just yeah my age just grew more than my gray hair right there, but I'm grateful no, I'm grateful for you.
Speaker 2:I'm grateful you're in our church body. I'm grateful for the great work that Salem is doing, praying for you, for unity, for mission, for vision, for confessing conservative Lutheranism, going forward boldly and. Tomball and beyond, and this has been great. People want to connect with you and your ministry. It sounds like from time to time you know you're working with different churches in the district and beyond. How could they contact you, vince?
Speaker 3:Yeah, email is probably the best way. The best way. My email address is V P A R K S. V P A R K S at Salem, the digit for the number four, the letter U, dot com. And if you ask me why we're at dot com, I have no idea.
Speaker 2:I inherited that domain here and haven't figured out how to get it all changed yet.
Speaker 3:V parts of Salem4ucom or through the church website. You can always catch me there.
Speaker 2:All right, this is lead time.
Speaker 2:Sharing is caring, uh, if you're taking it in YouTube, spotify, itunes, wherever it is, uh, please give us a a good comment, a review, if you will, and and please share it. Five star ratings are are helpful as we continue to hopefully have conversations within the LCMS. Praying for a new day and a new day doesn't necessarily mean man rapid growth. It means disagreeing agreeably, having conversations with those that are in different contexts and sharpening one another, all in anticipation of the day when Jesus returns. May he find us faithful in sharing his gospel, the truth of who Jesus is and how much he loves the world, in a Lutheran, sacramental, sacramental way. We need to fertilize. We need to fertilize more and more. We need to be in the wider ecumenical conversations today because what we have been given in the Lutheran confessions is such a such a gift? Why? Because it focuses us on Christ and his work for us, by grace, through faith, passively received in the waters of baptism. It's so good, vince, thank you so much, and we'll be back next week with another episode of lead time.
Speaker 2:You're awesome, dude. Look forward to it, see you.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to lead time, a podcast of the unite leadership collective. The ULC's mission is to collaborate with the local church to discover, develop and deploy leaders through biblical Lutheran doctrine and innovative methods To partner with us in this gospel message. Subscribe to our channel, then go to theuniteleadershiporg to create your free login for exclusive material and resources and then to explore ways in which you can sponsor an episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for next week's episode.