Stay on Mission: How Skyline Is Experiencing Growth Through Evangelism and Discipleship
It’s easy to go up to someone and say, “You’re a sinner, you’re going to hell, you need Jesus. Let me tell you how to have him.” That’s not effective. We say, do the harder thing. Build a relationship. Get to know someone, ask what’s going on in their life. Ask at some point, “How can I pray for you? Is there anything I can pray for you and your family?” It’s so simple, and it’s so disarming for people.
It takes the pressure off of people thinking, I gotta close the deal right now. It’s helped so much for people to reframe what they’re doing every day, reframe it to, “Wait a minute—that person doesn’t know Jesus, that person doesn’t have a church home. Maybe I need to be a little more intentional about just building that relationship.”
Have them over. Have a barbecue, give them gifts on their birthday, or whatever. It’s little things like that build the relationship.
Seeing Your Life as a Mission Field
What challenges come with experiencing rapid growth? How have you been able to ensure that as you’re growing big, you’re growing healthy?
One of the things we say a lot is we’re a big church that feels small. We’re always trying to make the big church feel small. We have a massive small group [ministry]. That’s one of the ways we want people to get connected. We have classes, we have things that are in smaller settings.
And then we work really hard on our staff culture—it’s certainly a buzzword, “culture”—but it’s something that if you don’t focus on it every day, it gets away from you. And we actually focus on it every single day. We have a great executive pastor, a great senior leadership team that focuses on our church culture, our staff, because it starts with our staff and our pastors and our directors, so we have very intentional one-on-ones. We have everything to keep everybody moving in the same direction, so that we are healthy.
We have things in place for our staff to make sure they’re not getting burned out. I did my doctoral dissertation on pastoral burnout. I couldn’t believe all my colleagues who had burned out or had moral failures. When I saw the stats, that only 1 in 10 pastors actually retire as a pastor, I couldn’t believe it. I did deep dives into the research of why. We’ve implemented the stuff I learned through my research into our church policy, so that our people are healthy and ready for ministry.
As you have been leading Skyline Church, you have also been walking through significant grief with the loss of your wife, Janie. How have you been able to lead through this season?
[It’s] definitely the toughest thing ever. I mean, she was everything. She was the perfect wife and perfect mom. There are no perfect people, but she was the perfect woman for me. I credit her with so much for allowing me to do what I did, because she took care of the home so well, and she was such a wonderful homemaker and friend, and the church loved her. So [it is] really, really difficult navigating.
