Starting From Scratch: Churchplanting & Entrepreneurship

Turning something/anything from a dream into reality is complex when it comes to organizations. In this episode, Dave Workman, Paul Baldwin, and guest panelist Sarah Anderson talk about their church planting experiences—what worked, what didn’t, and how they stayed (and are staying!) sane. What different leadership muscles are needed to start something from scratch…and what keeps you going when the going gets tough? Join them in a nuts-and-bolts conversation on launching new endeavors.

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Transcript

Sarah, how old are your boys? 

They are 15, 13, and 11. 

Oh, get down. Okay, I'm sure there are times where you're just like, "Seriously, I'm gonna tranquilize all you kids."

There really is a different wiring. There's something really wrong with little boys' brains. (laughing)

Welcome to the Elemental Leaders Podcast, designed to help you grow more effective in your leadership. Visit us at elementalgroup.org for more resources and free downloads.

Hey everyone, this is Dave Workman with the Elemental Leaders Podcast, and today we're gonna talk about entrepreneurship that is starting things from scratch. So whether that's planning a church or launching a nonprofit or a new ministry endeavor or a side hustle or whatever, what kind of leadership muscles are needed to do that? And what kind of personalities even want to do that? And can anybody do it? What are some of the first steps in bringing a dream into reality? What's the unique role that a leader has if it's her or his dream? What are some of the things that only the leader can do? Before we get started, let me introduce our panel today. 

My compadre and co-worker, Paul Baldwin is on board. If you're a regular to the podcast, you know, Paul, he usually hosts the show, but we like shaking things up every so often. And because I wanna ask him some questions. Paul is a coach and a consultant with the Elemental Group, but also a former church planter, pastor, executive pastor, and first mate on a tugboat at one point in his life.

You're never gonna let that go, are you?

By the way, Paul is also the author of a great book called "Devout in Doubt" about his very serious fight with cancer a few years ago. I highly, highly recommend it. Paul, how are you, my friend? And how's life in beautiful Charleston, South Carolina? 

And we just had that big giant storm that came over the east. And we were complaining about it until we heard about your guys' temperatures up there. And then we stopped complaining. So it was warm, but rainy. And you guys did not get warm. You got rainy and snow and freezing and all that. So we're doing really good. Thanks for asking.

All right, all right, that's enough. - That's enough. - Sheesh. 

Joining us for the first time is Sarah Anderson, who hails from my city since 90 Ohio. Sarah is the founder and senior pastor of a newer church plant, just a little over two years old. She's got very recent firsthand experience on our topic today. So it'll be fun to explore the challenges of someone who's kind of in the thick of an entrepreneurial experience. Besides planting and leading the church, she's also part of the national team for the Vineyard Women's Association. And what's more, the mom of three boys. Sheesh, Sarah, I feel like such a slacker. Thanks so much for being on our panel today and how is life in your corner of the world? 

Life is pretty good. It is crazy and chaotic with those three boys you were talking about. (laughing) But life is good, life is really sweet. 

Good, well, let's launch into this. Let me kind of set up our conversation here. Any new startup or new endeavor is challenging. In business world, only two in five startups are profitable and 90% fail. 10% of startups implode within the first year. Last year, 82% of businesses that went under did so because of cash flow issues. Resourcing any new startup is a challenge from the financial side. The obstacles against any success are even just survival or enormous. Now, since all of us were involved in different church planting endeavors at one level or another or with new ministry starts or whatever, think about this. One common statistic is that 80% of new church plants fail. Now, some folks like Warren Bird and Stetser, they argue against that. The North American Mission Board reports that they show there's actually a 68% success rate. But the reality is a good number of them do fail within the first five years. So success isn't guaranteed and it certainly isn't easy. So I thought we'd start off with this question. 

What was it that actually drove you to try to do this in the first place? What was it that made you want to plant a new church?

I never, ever, ever thought I would plant a church. That just was-- it was not my dream. It was not my life goal. I was a very shy little girl. People that knew me as a little child are kind of like, wow, you planted a church. OK, great. But I had a radical encounter with God about eight years ago in a class called the School of Kingdom Ministry. And that course just radically changed my life. I got some theological footing underneath me for the first time and learned that I hear from God and just felt a call on my life. And saw my life change so radically. I was like, I want this to happen in my own community. I want the people in Finneytown where I live to be able to experience this and to encounter the presence of God in the same way. That little dream just started to be born and has now come to fruition. I actually received a prophetic word about halfway through that course that God had strapped me to the front of a speeding train. That it was scary, but it was the Lord. And I mean, that proved true because that was eight, nine years ago. And here I am pastoring a church. 

Yeah, how did you respond to that? That's a pretty graphic image when that word is given. What was your initial response? 

A mixture of terror and great anticipation. It was a lot of wondering.

Has the church kind of proven to be a speeding train for you?

Yeah, I think just the journey to get here. I mean, going from volunteer small group leader to senior pastor in a span of not that very long, that felt like the speeding train for sure. I feel like it slowed down a little bit. Like I'm happy. Like senior pastor is great. Well, like we're going to stay here for a little bit in this station and flesh this out.

That's great. Paul, you kind of somewhat similar. You were on staff at a church first, correct, before you planted? That's right. I was on staff at a church and actually very, very happy there. It was a larger church. I kind of found my place as the student minister and then overall outreach missions pastor. We've been there for maybe 11 years. I was very happy there. And we had teenagers. I was a little bit older. I was 40 years old. And so the thought of planting a church, I'm an entrepreneur at heart. And so we had helped, we had helped send out a church and I overseen that plant. But to do it myself was not necessarily something I had in mind.

As far as church planning goes, it's changed quite a bit over the last 20 years. For instance, there now, and here we are talking with Sarah, there are more women planters than, way more, than in 20 years ago. The average age of the church planner though is older now. 42 is the average age. Oh, interesting. Yeah, not wild. It's more team based now. It's more multiracial. There's more thinking about multiplication. 

So with that in mind, Sarah, if you don't mind, tell us a little about your church planning experience. How weird was it to start off? 

It actually didn't feel weird at all. It felt really lovely. I did a large launch model. And so I gathered a lot of people to be on my launch team. And we started meeting a couple of months in advance. And then we had three preview services once a month. And then we launched on September 12th of 2021. And it was amazing just to see the community respond and to come in and see the team really get pulled in into the vision and into the dream and into the mission and be activated in that.

What was your experience like, Paul? Yeah, well, I'd mentioned that I had overseen the launching of a plant over on the west side of South Bend. And throughout that launch, there was something getting stoked in me. I was beginning to just think, hey, this might be something that I'd want to do. So it really began with calling with us. And we lived over on the east side of South Bend, which is a little town called Elkhart. It's where all the RVs, all the recreational vehicles are built in the country. And that calling just would not go-- I began to think about it all the time. And so I presented it to my wife, and she was super open to it. We thought it was crazy. But we were a part of a small group on the east side of town. And there were actually a couple of small groups that were pretty invested in the community. So that was our context. And so we just began to put this calling in front of other people and said, what would you think? What would you think? What would you think? One by one, just about everybody and those two small groups on the east side of town got really excited about this idea of forming another community over in this new context. And so we were about 36 of us at the end of the day that planted this church, all coming from our sending church. And so it was very natural. It took probably a year or two to kind of organically just evolve into this community.

So on your first opening Sunday, you had like 36, 40 people there already? Yeah, we had probably about 70 on our first. A lot of them came just to support. A lot of them were friends of friends. Hey, you should come check out this new church plant. And so our opening Sunday was probably about 65, 70. Can't remember. 

Gotcha. And Sarah, you used to term, you had a large launch. What did that actually look like in terms of numbers for you? What was your core team like? Our core team was about 45 people counting kids and teenagers, which I do count them as the children's pastor. They count. 

They have souls. And pregnant women count as two. 

Oh, yeah, there you go. But it was great. We decided to go with a large launch because I've lived in the community my entire life. And then my husband at the time was the elementary school principal. So he was very well known in the community. I have really deep roots in the community. Grant has a wide connection. And we just kind of figured if we tried to start in our basement, we'd probably outgrow it pretty quickly. And I'm a planner. So I was like, I need to know where we're going to go, know where we're going to be. But it worked out great. We started probably on our launch day, we had around 90 people come. And then we've hovered right around there. We've kind of gone up and down a little bit. But our average attendance right now is around 85, which feels like enough people to love and to know and to pastor. 

That's awesome. The church that I was a part of for 30 years, I didn't plan it. But when my wife and I came along, there were about 20 people or so in a meeting in a living room. And it was not a large church launch. In those days, typical of the tribe that we were a part of, it was just parachute in. And you're starting from scratch. Very different model in so many ways, so much harder to really get going. I saw the stat that church plants that were more than two years old with less than 100 in attendance averaged about $10,000 in startup costs and $60,000 in first year cost. And then for churches more than two years old, between 100 and 200 in attendance, the average startup cost were $84,000. So on average, larger launches mean quicker financial independence. So those that had at least 76 people in average attendance at launch were financially self-sustaining immediately. But the average church plant takes six years to get to 76 in attendance and any real self-sustainability financially. So we would have been in that model. I mean, it seems like it took us a few years to get to 70 people. 

What that leads me to thinking about, though, is how critical do you think it is for the church planner or the entrepreneur is their self-awareness. Back in the day, it was a civil rights leader named Benjamin Hooks. And he was the one who actually coined this phrase, decades ago, that if you think you're leading and you turn around and see that no one's following, then you're just taking a walk. So there's a certain amount of self-awareness that you have going to this. How did that work out for you? 

Yeah, for me, I've always been a natural gatherer and networker. And so the question for me was not, will people follow? The question for me was, can I lead them to where they need to be led? And so it's one thing to be followed. That is a great marker of a leader. But then the question for me was, can I lead them? Can I disciple them? Can I take them to this preferred future that we believe God is calling us to? And that was the thought that scared me. Can I really do this? Because now I'm the lead guy. I don't want to blow this. I don't want to screw this up. 

I think self-awareness is huge. I had a wonderful opportunity to be put in a well-being of pastors cohort through a Lilly Foundation grant. As I was figuring out if I was going to plant, where I was going to plant, when I was going to plant, all of that, I had two years of coaching, mentoring, and spiritual direction that was all paid for. And then another group of female pastors, they were my affinity group. So once a month, I had four Zoom calls where people were helping me be self-aware from all these different angles-- coaches, mentors, and spiritual directors. They all helped with that. But they come at you from different angles. And that was just vital to my health and my well-being as I was getting ready to launch and to plant. I was going through a lot of different things. And in our family, my son had a traumatic event. And there were a lot of things going on. And I had this moment where I said, like, God, just prune it all. Just take it all. Let's just get this done. And you should never really say that because he took me up on that. And he was like, we're going to go deep, and we're going to handle a lot of your gunk right now. And it was really, really difficult. But I had the supports in place to help me do it in a good way. And I don't think I would have been able to plant a healthy church without having gone through that and become so much more self-aware of what was going on deep internally. 

If I could add just an exclamation point to what she's saying there, the self-awareness of a leader for any endeavor, whether you start a business, nonprofit, especially a church, is so critical. In a lot of ways, planting a church-- and we use this imagery a lot-- was almost like having a baby. When you make the decision to have a baby, there's so much self-sacrifice, there's so much discipline, there's so much investment. Planting a church or planning any endeavor is just going to expose so many weaknesses, so many insecurities, so many inadequacies, so many shortcomings. It's just going to happen in the same way having a baby did all of that for Becky and I. We thought we were ready. And when we had this baby, we just realized, man, we don't know so much. And we just have to learn at an exponential rate. And so self-awareness is critical. I mean, just on an emotional level, on a spiritual level, even on a financial level, but relational level. So surrounding yourself with that support network, in the same way we had a coach from the network that helped us plant, we had pastoral support. Becky and I actually were in counseling for the entire time that we were there, and not because things were following a part, but because we wanted to proactively get in front of anything that might be exposed. And so just having that kind of proactivity, as Sarah said, is just radically, radically critical. And we had a team as well, which was super helpful. So we could bleed together. But for those who are planting on their own, that would be my encouragement. I would just echo what she's saying.

Yeah, I'm wondering, both of you now, as we've kind of talked through this, have mentioned your spouse. And my wonderment is, when you're starting a new thing like this and something as tricky as a church plant, how did it affect your spouse? And what maybe caught you by surprise? 

For Grant and I, we both have big jobs. He's now the business director for our school district and our community. And so he's in charge of a lot of big things. And then I'm running a church. We both have big jobs. I think one thing that surprised me and surprised him is that I actually have a lot more flexibility now that I'm the boss. So rather than being the children's pastor, like under somebody else, being able to be the boss and kind of set my own schedule, kind of make the decisions about the low of the church weekly, I actually have a lot more flexibility. And it's actually worked better for our family dynamic now that I'm a church planter than when I was a children's pastor at a larger church. Smaller churches, we just have a different dynamic. You can't have things going on five nights a week. There's not enough people to come to those types of things. So it's a different flow. It's a different dynamic. It's allowed Grant actually to continue to have a big job. And he's involved in the church. He sits on the board and he runs sound or plays piano every week. And he's involved, but he has his own big job that he's attending to during the week. 

Interesting. Paul, you mentioned that you and Becky were doing counseling while you were planting. How was it affecting her? 

Well I actually started counseling on my own because I knew that I was going into a season of change. I was changing my job after 10 years. We were changing churches. I was changing my leadership role. We actually changed houses. We really believed that we should live in the community that we were ministering. All of my kids were in different transition points, going into high school, going into college, going into junior high. So there was so much change that was happening. There was a lot of change financially. So I just knew that when you have that many life events that are in front of you, that's going to create stress. And I just, I'd known that because I have a counseling degree. And so I was just, again, self-awareness was important. So I started going to the counselor just to be proactive. So I didn't lose my mind. I wanted to make sure that I was healthy and that I was giving away health. 

And as we went through that, the counselor suggested that Becky come along with me to some of these appointments because I was dealing with some change with the counselor. And the counselor was like, hey, we need to bring her in so that you guys are handling this change together. And so that ended up turning into probably three years worth of counseling, marriage counseling, a business coaching. It was everything. And just, it was a beautiful, beautiful. It was probably one of the more catalytic seasons of growth in our marriage in the last 30 years. We just celebrated 30 years of marriage. And so that's kind of how she ended up coming into counseling. 

Both of you mentioned you had a team when you launched. How did you pick your team? Did people just come up and say, hey, I want to be part of whatever you're doing. And then how did you assign roles? How did that process work for you? 

I took whoever was willing to come. (laughing) Our sending church was super generous and said that anyone who wanted to come could come with us. So we did have quite a few people come from the sending church. Van Cochrane, my sending pastor, he had encouraged me to make the big ask. Not to just say, hey, come try it out, but to ask people to come and to give sacrificially of their time, their finances, and to commit to being there for two years. And so he said, make the big ask. And if you have a smaller team, but they're fully committed, that's better than a team of 100 people that are gonna leave when it gets less exciting in six months. So really just made the big ask. And I would say probably 95, 98% of our launch team is still around and we're two years plus. And a lot of them signed on six months before we actually launched. So they had to be thoughtful about their commitment. 

We had three categories of people. We had, again, we had a sending church. Rick Callahan, who was our lead pastor, he was super generous and he just said, anyone who wants to go can go. And he was very selfless from that standpoint. They even sent us money to invest, which was great. Then we had those two small groups on the east side of town that we invited. There were a few people that I handpicked and personally invited and told them why I felt like they would be a great addition to the team. And half of them said yes, and half of them said no, you don't have 'cause you don't want to ask. So I went ahead and asked and I got about 50% of those people. So those are the three categories.

What kept each of you going when it got kind of tough in your planting experience? 

For me, I'm a runner. So physically, that's a lot of my time with Jesus has spent kind of out in nature just on a hike or on a run after I do a devotion. So I just knew that I had to continue to pour into that cup because so much was being required from that cup. And I knew that to be a good dad and be a good husband and be a good pastor, it was just a non-emotional. So I just, I overemphasized my practices, spiritual practices. That was probably the biggest thing.

I really leaned on safe people and safe places. My coach, my mentor, my spiritual director, I kept, I'm still going with my spiritual director and my coach, she and I still meet. Those safe places were huge for me. I have a best friend that was at our sending church and everyone kind of made the assumption, oh, she's gonna come, she and her family are gonna go with you. And they decided to stay and that was the biggest blessing because now I'm not her pastor. She's my best friend and only my best friend. She's not one of my flock, so to speak. And so she was a really safe place for me. And so just keeping these safe places where people love me for me and not for the fact that I'm their pastor and having safe places to process. Also, I had a big intercessory prayer team that I asked to come and pray for the church before we launched. And so those were also safe places, a safe place where I could reach out and say, this is going on, can you pray? And they would respond and they would send me prophetic words. We had a Google document, just a running Google doc of prophetic words and prayers and prayer requests. And that's been cool. I mean, we're only two or three years out from that time, but all ready to look back and to see that and see how God has answered and how some of those words have come true. That really was just vital for me to feel grounded and rooted in the call, even when things were hard.

We had a prayer team as well. It was actually a prayer team of just people handpicked around the country. There were times where I would send emails and say, guys, I don't want to do this anymore. And there's no real rational reason why, other than I just don't enjoy this anymore. Can you please pray me off the ledge there? And that would be my email, but I had an established trust with them that they knew that Paul wasn't gonna jump off the ledge there. He needs to externally process. And they would just pray it up. And somehow the Lord would just show up and show off and do his thing. 

Let's switch gears here. How did you guys get financing? There are chairs and furniture, kid supplies, there's visual and print materials. I guess what I'm looking for is just some super practical nuts and bolts stuff of getting started. How did you get any financing? How'd that work? 

We had just an incredibly generous church that really believed in church planting. And so for us, I mentioned that I was over the student ministry. I had a staff for that. I didn't spend a lot of time over students at that point. And then I was over mission and outreach, which included church planning. And so from a salary standpoint, for the first year while I was on staff, they allowed me to take 50% of my time and give it to the church plant. The next year, they paid half of my salary. And then I chose to actually get a job. I really believed in the bivocational method. I just, I really wanted to make sure I was amongst the people that I was going to be reaching. I was full-time church planting, but I had 50% salary from the church. And then the third year, I had that 50% from the sending church. And then the church plant was able to cover the other 50%. And so they were just extremely generous on top of the fact that they gave us about 50 or 60 grand worth of equipment and investing in supplies, along with the staff from that sending church to kind of help put together sound equipment, put together curriculum and these types of things until we were on our feet. So I hear a lot of these stories about folks that go in, just husband and wife, co-pastoring, and just them. And I feel really, really privileged and super grateful that we had it the way we did. 

How about you, Sarah? How'd that work for you? 

Our sending church was super generous. They ended up doing a giving campaign for their 20th anniversary. So we got a big chunk of our launch budget from that. I created a very detailed launch budget and made it totally public, just a Google sheet and everyone had access to it. I would send it out and they could see down to the penny what we needed money for. Like we need this toy for the kids ministry. We need these baskets for the offering. We need this microphone, whatever. And just kept it totally transparent and we exceeded our launch budget, blew it out of the water and got everything that we needed and more. We actually had an anonymous donor give us $70,000 with the intent that we redo the sound system in the performing arts center of the local high school where we meet as a gift to the school district. Before we ever had a Sunday there, we had given this massive gift to the school district, which really, I mean, we already had so much favor from the school district, but just really went a long way towards our relationship with them. And so we've just been super blessed. There's been so many generous people around us and then we've continued to just have more than enough. And part of what I've done and I've been very open about it with our church is we tithe the first 10% of what our church gets. And we actually just upped that for next year. We're gonna do 11.5% giving away. I really think that that's part of the key. We've had our focus outward. We've had our focus on getting the gospel into our community and also around the world. So finances, it just hasn't really been an issue. It's been kind of like, well, what are we gonna do with this? What are we gonna do with this money?

That last point is super important. You know, with church plans, you have such an opportunity to infuse DNA in from day one, including teaching and discipling your people on what generosity means. It's more than just giving 10% of your income. It's so much bigger than that when we model the heart of God's generosity. And when your church leadership models that for you, it just really pulls together an entire spirit of generosity as a core value of your church. 

In our experience on the other side of this, from the earliest days, we knew that we were gonna do more church planting and started right away. And so over the course of time, we planted about, I think it was about 25 churches or so. After a while, we had kind of two tiers of church planting. And one was this is very intentional. This is a geographical area in our region. And the other tier was people in the church who just felt like, you know, I just feel like I'm supposed to plant a church. And in that case, we would just bless them and say, whatever you can drag out of here, go for it. That's okay. But that was it. On the intentional tier, we would give the planter about $60,000. And then of course, coaching along with that. And we would really actually say, if you can find anything around here, it's not nailed down, just take it. Take it out of here and go for it. And give them wide berth to invite anyone they want there. So, you know, they were always blessed in front of the congregation with, hey, here's this group, they're going off to this part of town and so forth. One of the churches we planted, you know, with that kind of thing in mind, we took an 11% drop in our overall finances out of that one church plant. So this person was really skilled at asking the right people to go with them. But, you know, it's what you were saying, Sarah, somehow when you're outward focused, you really can't out give God. Somehow it just flows back in, then you keep going. 

Let me ask you, Sarah, so as a woman in the evangelical church world that is so male dominated, how did you navigate that? What were some of the challenges that you hit? 

There's definitely unique challenges to being a female pastor. We have more and more female pastors. It is a bit unique still, even in the vineyard, that my husband's not pastoring with me. A lot of our female pastors pastor with their husbands, it's, you know, a bit unusual. We've talked about making a shirt that says first husband for grant to wear. There's a church in our neighborhood where we walk our dogs sometimes and they have parking spots labeled pastors parking and pastors wife's parking. Hey, Grant, look, there's your spot. (laughing) 

That's hilarious.

There's so much out there. I think it maybe has been more difficult for Grant than for me. It's an interesting space to be, to be the pastor's husband. There's not a whole lot of grace for that yet or understanding around that. I will say it takes a very strong man to do that, to sit in the front row and listen to your wife preach. He's a wonderful man and he jokingly will refer to himself as Mr. Sarah. He's like, I just don't know what else I have to do. You know, he's willing to do that. He's wonderful, but I think for me, I had to get my theological footing underneath me and make sure that I was okay between me and God. There was no doubt in my mind that he was calling me to do this. So I'm like, you wouldn't call me to do this if you didn't agree that I should be doing this. So really be okay between myself and God. Find myself rooted in that call. And then that is what gave me the confidence to be able to walk into rooms and say, this is what I'm doing. Are there still aggressions and microaggressions? Even in my own church, like people will come and say, well, her husband's here, he's covering her. Or, you know, and I'm like, wow, you're in a church and I am your senior pastor. And you're saying that to me. Okay, we've got some work to do, you know? But just being able to let those things kind of roll off and at the end of the day, come back to me and the father and the son and the Holy spirit and just say, like you called me to do this. You love me, you believe in me. You asked me to do this. And at the end of the day, I'm doing it for him. I'm not doing it for anybody else. 

It is interesting to see who does come. I actually have a lot of females in my church that have experienced church hurt and they feel very, very safe with a female pastor and that ministers to them in a different way. It's gonna continue to be an interesting journey. (laughing) I'm not, woohoo, everyone should be a female pastor and we should kick all the men out. Absolutely not. I think men and women should serve together and work together. I'm actually, I actually have to be cognizant at my church that we do have male representation. I have a male worship leader and I have a male youth pastor, but even on the stage, I'm cognizant. Do we have male voices? Because I believe so firmly that it is male and female that represent and image God. And so we need to have both of those voices present in the church. 

Because we work with lots of different kinds of churches in with the elemental group, sometimes people want to pit, for instance, large churches or mega churches against small churches or house churches or micro churches. And it just seems to me that you need lots of different contexts and lots of different kinds of leaders to really reach everyone that we're supposed to reach. There are people who will only want to go to a Taylor Swift concert with 70,000 other people and that's their jam. There are other folks who just want to go to a coffee house and hear somebody with a little acoustic guitar and that's it. That's just where they're most comfortable. It just seems like we haven't really thought about that from the gender perspective as well. Who is comfortable with whom as their leader? Just seems like I'd be smart to kind of be thinking about that and explore it fully for the sake of the kingdom. 

At this point in your lives, Sarah, you're much, much, much, much younger than me. So your span from when you start is a little smaller. But at this point, if both of you could go back and tell your little bit younger self or much younger self some advice as a church planter, what would you tell them now? 

You'll never regret asking for prayer or taking the time to let someone pray for you. You'll never regret reading the books. Like I took a lot of time to read books as I was preparing to launch and then kind of got out of the habit because I was doing all of the things and now my goal is to get back to reading the books and you're never gonna regret taking the time for mentoring, coaching, spiritual direction, doing those things. We've hit on this a little bit, but the church really can only be as healthy as the church planter is. It's just church planting is entirely different from running a church. You really infuse your life, your vision, your health into the church. And so take the time to be healthy.

That was my number one thing. Make sure spiritual emotional priority is there in place. Audible.com $14.95 a month is the best tool I had. I mean, I just, I went through so many different books while I was running or while I was driving. So there's some practical things like that. If you're married, just make sure that you are over intentional about investing in your marriage. We had a thing we call two by two by two and that was twice a week we would check in, are we doing all right? Twice a month we would go on an actual date and there were some times that we just had to lock ourselves in our bedroom with Netflix and a sandwich 'cause we had all our kids at home. Then we would try to get out of town for a couple of times in our marriage, that sort of thing. And then just learn to keep it simple and prioritize. You know, different questions like what must I do? What should I do? What could I do? You know, what must I not do? Those types of exercises were just critical to constantly prioritize what should I be doing? Everything else I'll try to delegate and coach and these types of things.

Well, I can't thank you guys enough. This was good solid information, nuts and bolts stuff and things just kind of chew on. For all of you out there in the podcast universe, thank you so much for joining us. Just to remind you, at the Elemental Group, we work with churches and faith-based nonprofits just like yours to get a little healthier and a little more effective and become everything that God has dreamed for you. So please go check out all the resources in our new menu of services at elementalgroup.org and let us know if we can help in any way. But for now, we'll see you back here the next time. Take care. 

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