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Lifeway Leadership Podcast Network. Good afternoon, Scott Sanders. Welcome to the one thing a podcast is on to give you one solo practical tip for gospel sin ministry every week. And I am solo this week. No Derek, no lady. So I took the time to catch up with Tony Payne and press into an article that he wrote

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on the pain book trip when ministry doesn't work. And so let's have a listen to my discussion with Tony Payne. So Tony, give us a bit more context around this episode. Well, we're here talking about what happens where ministry doesn't work. And it came out of an article I recently wrote. I've been writing about on the painful truth, I'm sure plug there. I've been writing about the basics of ministry, word and prayer. And someone helpedfully wrote back in a great guy, a friend of mine wrote in and said,

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that's great. I agree. Word and prayer is all ministry is. But what happens when it doesn't work? Like you do, you feel like you're doing that faithfully, but nothing much has happened. And there's no people being converted and things feel stagnant. What then? And so I decided I'd write a little short response. What happens when ministry doesn't work? And in one sense, this requires a book to answer. And I can say that I've tried, like Patrolis and the Vine project in many ways. And a whole bunch of other resources. That's right. And you've done consulting, you've got a

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churchist put on workshops. Exactly. There's a very, very, very big question. How do we do that? But even then after all that, what happens if it still doesn't work? And so I tried to distill it down into six little points is to we can think through about how would I think about it when our ministry isn't working? Now I do want to push in. I've been most of our time talking about culture. But what do you mean by not working? How do we assess that something's not working? What's the big sort of outcome that we're looking for? That's a really good question because you want to be careful, don't you? That you don't have too

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simplistic view of what not working means. You don't just want to give the pure pragmatist kind of answer that not working equals budget equals not enough or people not enough. You've got to think theologically about what not working means for you. Obviously not working would mean we're not seeing people converted, not seeing the gospel be a fruit in people's lives. You're not seeing the gospel grow. I think that's what I say by now. The gospel is a growing thing. It has a dynamism to it. And where it's present and God is working through it by His Spirit,

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there's growth. People are converted. People grow in spiritual maturity. If you don't see that, you think something's not happening, though, I feel should be happening. Yeah, I love how you say, beware of the silver bullet. From the silver bullet guys, from the vine project guys, there's no silver bullet, which is great. Again, if you do dig in and actually read the Trellis and Vine and the vine project, they will say repeatedly, there is no silver bullet. It's the work of the word and prayer and seeing the Holy Spirit.

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And it takes time. And what I was particularly saying in answering his question, the first that's the first thing I said, and especially I was thinking, we just flip to monocausal explanations of things so easily. That if you only change this one thing, the one thing would be good name for a podcast. If you just change this one thing, then you'll be right. Here's your answer. It's almost never that simple. It's almost never one thing. It's almost always everything. Yeah, which is helpful. At Reaches Tryout, we've been really trying to get that

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concept of church being an E.K. system and there being multiple entry points and multiple points you need to be working on in ministry. I've used the language of culture and it's very simple. That's very similar. That a church is a whole complex web of structures and practices and people and habits and traditions and ministries and language and all these sort of work together for good or real. They reinforce each other and shifting that culture or changing the whole system

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requires real time and effort and thought. And sometimes it's not working because over time that culture has shifted and moved in a particular direction and an unhealthier, unhealthier, helpful direction. You speak in the article which we'll provide in the show notes of combining theological insight, teaching ability, godly character and competence. You want to see all of those and you see those in the pastoral epistles, we see those in characteristics of an elder and a deacon. How do you grow in that? How does a leadership team grow in that?

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It seems to me when you're thinking about what's happening here in our church and what's wrong and how can we shift and how can we change. I think God gives us three gifts. He gives us his word, he gives us his spirit and he gives us each other. And where particularly I think talking about that third one, when it comes to thinking through how do I grow myself as a pastor in leading my church to be more healthy, to be to grow, to for things to work if I can put it in in verticomers.

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We're going to have to think about a word ministry, we'll come back and talk about that, we have to think about prayer, we should talk about that. But we're going to have to think about ourselves. And not only our own repentance and our own heart, but our own abilities, our own competence. And looking for help in that, looking for others who've had experience and wisdom and who can grow us in the ability to pull things together, who can help us be reflective about ourselves, and our weaknesses, and how we might be inhibiting growth. And who can provide models and examples, and case studies, and new skills and new knowledge to improve in the way you're leading that change.

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I mean that's where this whole thing of leadership development comes from. I'm think for many of us, I almost wrote another blog post, in fact I've got an on my list called Who Needs Leadership Development, which is kind of I think it expresses the answers everyone, isn't it? Yeah that's right, it expresses the ambiguity of how many of us feel about it. Our leadership development, oh here we go, here's another kind of rev up to go on it. I don't know if time for that or that's… Yeah yeah who needs it, but who needs it? We need it because we all fail and we're all inadequate as leaders and God has given us each other, to help each other, to develop each other,

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to push each other, to learn from each other. And in many ways that's what a good leadership development program is. It's an opportunity for me to learn about myself and about the work I'm doing by talking with others and learning from them in the context of the word. And I think, I mean you're pushing into that in Rich Australia, I mean that's what Rich Australia is essentially seeking to do, it seems to me, to develop a leadership development program like that. Yeah one that gets you to take a good, hard look at yourself as a leader, but in the context of

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peers, in the context of thinking about it in your church and with your church leadership as well, I think that's the helpful push as well and this, you know, a ministry leader needs to open themselves up to you know, feedback and yeah, criticism's not the right word, but I think you know that honest, you know, honest thinking and talking amongst their team. Yeah, that's right. And two of the things I think we need to assess, and this is kind of the two other key points in that little article, were that we can sometimes think, look, it's the word

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and prayer, those are the two key things that we should be doing in ministry. I'm doing that, I'm doing that, right? And it doesn't seem to be working, but we need to push into what does it mean to say we're doing the word? What is actually, what is our word ministry like? Is our word ministry really just, we say, well, it's pretty good sermon every Sunday and we have some Bible study groups and so we're doing word ministry. Now effective is that word ministry and how much is the word ministry reverberating around into all the different parts of the culture or the ecosystem

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or the or the community that we are? It seems to me that the picture of word ministry and at congregation in the New Testament is very rich, as it says in Colossians, that the word to on among you richly and the impact of that is that we teach and at Monish each other that there's all kinds of speaking the truth in love as each part does its work and Ephesians for so that the whole body builds itself up. In other words, if the extent of your word ministry is we preach a good sermon on Sundays, well that's great, that's the foundation and the fact you, but it's a matter of

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also thinking through, is the word penetrating down and is an effective word ministry spreading and reverberating out in all different aspects of the community, the Christian community, and that will only be happening really if we're intentionally thinking about how that's going to grow, how we're going to train for it, how we're going to mobilize people for it, how we're going to spread that culture. And so to say, yeah, we're doing the word, but it's not working. Sometimes I want to people to examine are we really doing what we can or should be doing in the word and is the word reverberating out

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in ministry throughout the whole ecosystem. So it's not that we've tried doing the word ministry and it doesn't work. Sometimes we haven't tried it enough. I've asked you this a few times before, what's the dashboard for the Saturday gather, you know, you came back and said, well if people are hanging around for 45 minutes, something must be going all right, but that could be because there's a long coffee line or there's really good food. It might not have much to do with the fact that people are speaking the truth in love to each other after service, but that is a, it is a,

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you know, it's a really useful test to sort of say, yeah, people actually sticking around, they're they're enjoying the community life here and they're wanting to keep those conversations rolling on afterwards, but how do we assess our Sunday gatherings and how how they're going to actually, you know, effectively discipling our people? When we work with people in Charleston Vine workshops to evaluate their Sunday gatherings, we normally get them to actually sit down and listen to them as a team, which is an embarrassing and difficult thing to do, like it. When you sit and listen to

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what the whole thing is and just you evaluate it, but in particular, evaluate it in terms of how is it achieving the various things that the Sunday gathering is meant to achieve? That is, is it engaging the newcomer and outsider with the gospel and welcoming and drawing them into that gathering? Is it saying something for the new Christian that encourages and warms them? Is it addressing the more established Christian to push them further and is it stretching the established Christian? And is it training the whole congregation to be ministers themselves? How to read the Bible and

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how to take it further? And you can, you can look at each aspect, you can look at the, the various aspects of a Sunday gathering and evaluate it in those different categories, how effectively did we do though each of those things? And in one sense, as in any kind of evaluation exercise, it's an art, not a science, it's very hard to give those things a mark out of ten, but you can give them an arbitrary mark out of ten if you want, and you can certainly tell what things are working or not working. But it's the exercise as well. Actually, stopping going back and listening,

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we spoke to Simon Manchester, he's just written a sort of a grumpy article, you probably read it just on Sunday gatherings. And it was really useful, you can clearly say, I have a course of years of ministry. He's constantly listening, tweaking, providing feedback to people. It's a regular activity so that he's created this culture of, I don't want to use the word excellence, but he is looking for effectiveness, he is looking for purposefulness in the gathering

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and asking a high question, is this purposeful? Now I don't think I agree with everything, like a kid's talk has to do this and puppets, you know, kind of puppets, I'm thinking, all right, puppets are quite a good teaching theatre, it's good to use. But he's in touch, and he's purposeful, and he knows he's got a bit of clarity about what he's seeking to achieve, which is really helpful. It is. I think the same is true with Prescott. I think we can easily say, so we've been talking about the word and how the word has its way in our sake of convivational gatherings, our preachings, life, our effective, so examining our word ministry and

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actually we have a thriving word ministry and we're creating lots of contexts in which the word can do its thing. But I think we also have to really deliberately pause and think about prayer, if apostolic ministry is word and prayer, I think prayer, it's always after thought, isn't it? Certainly is with me and I don't know if it's just I'm sinful or I'm a Western person, I don't know, but it's funny how prayer is, we don't devote ourselves to prayer in the way that we devote ourselves to the word in my experience. And I think very often that's a real area to stop and evaluate and

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think about together and take action on together. It could well be that if things aren't going so well and aren't working so well in that sense, it might be just that we're not falling on our knees before our father and begging him to work through the word and we're not receiving because we're not asking because it says in James. Yeah, Tom Reiner's book, who changed my pulpit? That's where he starts in the change process. Stop and pray. He's a lovely Christian bloke,

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but we very much the research, very much the quantitative analysis. But that's where he starts. Actually, we go stop and pray. This is a spiritual thing that we're doing here. It's not it's not just apply, cod is eight change management steps and everything will work. No, actually, if we believe that the word is powerful, if we believe that God needs to change hearts, that everybody's totally deprived and needs a spirit work then, there we ought to be praying, that ought to be our practice. So, Tony, what's your one thing when it comes to ministry not working?

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Are you really deep in the word enough? Are you devoted to prayer as you should? On top of those things, are you getting the help from other people that you need to grow as a leader? So, let me open up the toolbox. Tony's already mentioned the Ritch Australia Leadership Development Program. Of course, I'm going to rave about that. It's a great program. If you're looking for some assistance and outside help, the Ritch Australia two-year leadership development program

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helps you look into how your church is going by a full church health consultation. Provide you with two years of coaching to actually walk alongside you to help you implement some of that change and then finally helps you grow in your competency in your leadership development by three leadership development intensives and that all takes place with a cohort of peers so that you can reflect personally, reflect as your church and then reflect with a bunch of peers as well. So, check out the Ritch Australia Leadership Development Program. We'll put a link in the show notes

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to Tony's article. Well, if you've liked what you've heard today, then we would love it if you could share today's episode. I reckon it's been a really important episode to think into. So, share it with someone. Hopefully, be encouraging and move them towards making that step to jump into a leadership development program. Well, thanks for joining us. I'm Scott Sanders.