From Imitation to Innovation: Finding Your Church’s Own DNA with Sam Hamstra

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Welcome back to another episode of the unSeminary podcast. Today we’re joined by Sam Hamstra, Lead Pastor of Anthem Church, a fast-growing, multi-ethnic and multi-generational church serving Northwest Indiana and Chicagoland. Anthem became an independent church in March 2020—the same week the world shut down—and has since grown to multiple locations and thousands of people. In this conversation, Sam shares how clarity around mission, values, discipleship, and vision has helped Anthem develop a distinct ministry culture and sustain healthy growth.

Does your church know exactly who it is and how it does ministry? Are your leaders aligned around a shared playbook—or are you borrowing someone else’s model without adapting it to your context? Sam offers practical lessons on creating organizational clarity that shapes everything from calendars to leadership development.

• Move from imitation to innovation. // Sam is quick to acknowledge how much Anthem learned from churches and networks that came before them. But even before Anthem launched, he began recognizing that another church’s model could not simply be copied and pasted into Northwest Indiana. The local culture, demographics, ministry environment, and people were different. Healthy leaders learn from others while also doing the harder work of discerning what God is uniquely calling their church to become.
• Clarity takes courage. // Copying an established model feels safe because leaders can see evidence that it works somewhere else. Developing your own approach requires greater faith because the outcome is less predictable. Sam believes churches must have the courage to move into that uncertainty. Rather than endlessly chasing the next successful strategy, leaders should prayerfully identify the unique blueprint God has given their church and commit to it.
• Define your “way.” // Inspired by Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage, Sam and his leadership team spent roughly nine months working through five foundational questions: Why do we exist? How do we behave? What do we do? How do we live? Where are we going? Their answers eventually became what they call “The Anthem Way”—a framework that brings clarity to mission, values, discipleship, spiritual formation, and long-term vision.
• Mission and vision are not the same thing. // Anthem’s mission is to lead people to know Christ and make Him known. That mission remains constant because it flows from the Great Commission. Vision answers a different question: where is God taking this particular church? Separating those ideas has helped Anthem distinguish between the timeless calling of the church and the specific future they believe God is leading them toward.
• Let your discipleship pathway drive the calendar. // One of the biggest benefits of clarity has been simplifying Anthem’s yearly ministry calendar. Instead of allowing every ministry to bring new ideas and events to the table, leaders evaluate opportunities through their defined discipleship pathway. The result is greater focus and consistency. Sam says their annual rhythm has remained largely the same for years, helping both staff and attenders understand what comes next.
• Boring can be a strength. // Churches often feel pressure to constantly create something new, but Sam has learned that repetition can be one of the greatest drivers of health. Anthem maintains a weekly prayer gathering, predictable discipleship rhythms, and recurring ministry events rather than continually reinventing the calendar. The goal is not novelty. It is consistency around the few things the church believes matter most.
• Create intentional invite moments. // Anthem builds four major invite opportunities into its annual rhythm: Easter, a Summer Kickoff, Homecoming, and Christmas. These predictable moments give the congregation specific opportunities to invite friends and family. Sam has seen the church grow following these events because people know when the church is intentionally creating space for them to bring someone who may not normally attend.
• Values have to become behaviors. // Anthem’s core values include “We Love People,” “We Choose Joy,” and “We Bleed Passion.” But Sam emphasizes that values only matter when people can see them lived out. Loving people means creating a culture where people can belong before they behave. Choosing joy means approaching ministry with gratitude rather than obligation. Bleeding passion means refusing to settle for the status quo and remaining willing to change as God leads.
• Use clarity to protect multisite culture. // As Anthem expands to additional locations, the Anthem Way provides clear boundaries for what must remain consistent. Sam is not claiming Anthem’s approach is the only way to do church, but he does believe it is important for every one of their locations to understand and embody Anthem’s distinct way of doing ministry. That documented clarity gives leaders freedom while protecting the culture across campuses.

Check out Anthem Church’s About page to see how their story, mission, values, and discipleship pathway fit together. You can also follow @SamHamstra and @ThisIsAnthemChurch on Instagram.

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Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. Really looking forward to today’s conversation. This is a funny one because literally yesterday I was talking to a church in a coaching call. We were talking about this exact issue that we’re going to unpack today. They’re wrestling with these things. I know that this is going to help you. So you’ve tuned in for a great conversation today with Sam Hamstra. Super excited to have him. He and his wife, Taylor, they founded Anthem Church in March 2020 with a vision and heart to lead people to know Christ and make them know known.

Rich Birch — Over the past few years they have seen this mission become a reality, continues to grow. It’s a multi-ethnic, multi-generational family made up of thousands of people from all walks of life in Northwestern Indiana, Chicagoland, and beyond. It’s one of the fastest growing churches in the country. So honored that you’re with us today, Sam. Welcome.

Sam Hamstra — Rich, so honored to be with you. This is a full circle moment for me. I’ve been following you for quite some time. So super honored to be on your on your show.

Rich Birch — Oh, come on. That’s I’m glad you’re here. We, we’ve got a lot to learn from you today. So March, 2020, it’s one of those dates that sticks in all of our brains. Cause like, we all know, what were you doing? March 15th, 2020. We all can say exactly what we’re, where we were. That’s a wild month to, to launch.

Rich Birch — It’s funny because I keep bumping into people who are telling a similar story. They’re like, we started during the pandemic, right at the beginning, right after that sort of thing. Give us a picture today and kind of from that moment all the way on to today, kind of bring the story, bring us, tell us a little bit about Anthem. Give us a flavor of the church.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah, so we currently today we’re headquartered in Hammond, Indiana, which when we say Indiana, different people have different thoughts. But we’re we’re actually butting up to Chicago.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Sam Hamstra — Joking around right now, we’re going to be the future home of the Chicago Bears soon.

Rich Birch — Nice.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah. But um yeah, so we’re headquartered in Hammond. Our second location is in Merrillville, Indiana, about 30 minutes from here. So currently um our family’s grown to about 2,500 people in English. And we also have a Spanish service as well. And God’s done a phenomenal work over a six-year time frame.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah, so we did launch in March of 2020. Our first Sunday was the same Sunday the world shut down.

Rich Birch — Wow.

Sam Hamstra — And so the third week of March was our first service on the internet.

Rich Birch — Dude, that’s amazing.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah.

Rich Birch — That’s incredible.

Sam Hamstra — Yes. So in God’s divine plan, kind of underneath our origin story, we we were actually a part of a church in Tinley Park, Illinois. We were a location of that church called Christian Life Center.

Sam Hamstra — And our senior pastor and I, Pastor Jerry McQuay, we had been having an ongoing conversation about him making us independent, which is a whole long story. And he decided to really lean into what he believed God was doing in our lives and in this region and made us independent in God’s divine plan. That started in March of 2020.

Rich Birch — Wow.

Sam Hamstra — And so we transitioned from being a multi part of a multi site church a location up to being independent in March. And yeah, we started with nothing. We didn’t have any cameras, didn’t have anything. I called our media guy and said, do you have anything at your house? And he brought it. Yeah.

Rich Birch — What gear you got in your basement? Yeah, that’s amazing.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah and he he brought a camera from his house. And yeah, that’s how we started. One continuous shot streaming online. And that was the start of Anthem Church in March of 2020.

Rich Birch — Wow. Yeah, that’s amazing.

Sam Hamstra — So God’s done a great work.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s incredible. That’s cool to hear and fun to see where it’s come, you know, since then. When you look back on that experience, you know, a lot of what you’re trying to define in those early days of a church, you’re trying to bring clarity to like, what is our approach? And part of what we do is you know, we there’s ah there’s, I think, some good copying and pasting. You’re like, hey, here’s the way they do it over here. Maybe we could try a little bit that. But then eventually you start kind of coming up with your own way. You kind of birth your own a approach, playbook, you might call it.

Rich Birch — When did you start to feel… ah the kind of transition from, hey, I just want to do it like in this case, either CLC or another church over there. And you started to realize, hey, there’s something unique here at Anthem. And we got to try to define some of that. Talk us through maybe from um a timeline point of view or from a revelation point of view, like, oh, this is kind of things I started to see. Talk us through what that looked like.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah, so about two years before we launched Anthem, God started to really kind of do a work in our heart just on unique DNA. And we were coming out of like heavily influenced by ARC, Church of the Highlands, and learned so much from there.

Sam Hamstra — And we’re seeing just how like clarity really was so important on where we’re going.

Sam Hamstra — And so we were coming in there and I just was really praying and seeking the Lord on, okay, this is great. But in our context here, there’s some some differences, there’s some nuances.

Sam Hamstra — This is, um we’re over here. what What does this look like here? And so really took the foundation of that and started looking at what does this look like? So when we started Anthem, it was with the thought of, we really want to lean into this unique blueprint of how God designed us and what God has called us to here.

Sam Hamstra — So it really started from the jump from from day one. And so but it was a couple years ahead of time to say, OK, this is great. Let’s let’s use this. Let’s we’ve been imitating. Let’s imitate now move to a little bit of innovation and what the Lord would have for us.

Rich Birch — Yeah, and there’s obviously there’s like an art and science to that, right? There’s like the, the yeah, insert whatever church, Church of the Highlands is fantastic. They’re doing a great thing, but you’re not Birmingham, Alabama. And you know and so there’s cultural differences, there’s community differences, there’s different resources and all that. That’s like the kind of science-y part of it.

Rich Birch — But then there’s the art part of it, which is a little bit more… like intuitives, it’s like vibes, that kind of thing. How did you discern, okay, what are those things that we should be thinking about that are different that you start, or maybe things you started to see, evidence you started to see like, oh, maybe this isn’t working, just importing. Was there evidence of that that you saw?

Sam Hamstra — Yeah, so like, and it was like small things, you know, just on approach to Sunday service.

Rich Birch — Right.

Sam Hamstra — You know, like, hey, this is open door, we don’t do this on Sunday. And we had just been starting to see like pretty early on, we’re we’re reaching lost people through like a hard approach to the gospel.

Sam Hamstra — And it was just like, it wasn’t really seeker sensitive.

Rich Birch — Sure.

Sam Hamstra — It wasn’t, not saying they are, but just, it was just a little bit different in in our context where people were coming from. On the multi-ethnic side, it was just some approaches being super intentional with sounds, sights, all of that in in our context. And so, and even on the discipleship model, you know, groups, what kind of groups are we doing? How are we setting these up?

Sam Hamstra — And so it was definitely like these nuances in the different categories, I would say, of discipleship that we started to pay attention to. That that was really the start, I think, of innovating what we have now.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s cool. Why do you think so many of us just reach for someone else’s model rather than doing the longer, harder, deeper, like it’s more annoying work to try to define you know our own thing and and then ultimately to document it which we’re going to get to here. what What did you actually do to kind of try to codify that? But why do you think we avoid that as leaders?

Sam Hamstra — Yeah, so I think on one end, what’s established, you can see that the model works. And so um there’s great success you’re seeing. I mean, it’s working everywhere. And so I think it’s safe. And so deep down, it’s like this is established. I see it work. And so I can kind of press play on this. And and I know to a level that this this works.

Sam Hamstra — And so it takes courage to do something that you haven’t seen before.

Rich Birch — Right.

Sam Hamstra — And deep, deep down, i think in our hearts, to me, that’s probably foundational thing. It’s like, man, I haven’t really seen this so his is going to require some courage, require some faith to press into the unknown.

Rich Birch — Right. Right.

Sam Hamstra — And so I do think that unknown word leads to some different decisions sometimes.

Rich Birch — Well, and your church is an interesting um example just because it’s grown so quickly. I, you know, even in the… the lead up to it, I was thinking about, you know, the word, the term church plant.

Rich Birch — Like, I don’t know when that term, you know, I was talking with a church that had been around for 30 years and they’re a big church. They’re like 20,000 people. And they, the lead pastor was like, well, we still think of ourselves as a church plant. And I’m like, yeah, I don’t at some point you stop being a church plant and just be, you start being a church.

Rich Birch — And I think actually this is one of those, one of those differentiations is when you start saying, okay, like we’re going to, we believe that kind of God’s called us to this unique thing. There’s something in there. You built something that I think you call the Anthem Way.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Walk us through what that is. How does it function? What is the Anthem Way? Help us understand that.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah, so this was actually birthed in an odd place. I was reading “The Advantage” by Patrick Lencioni,…

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Sam Hamstra — …and he was talking about organizational health, and one of the keys is clarity.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Sam Hamstra — And I had I have kind of, I’m somewhat of a mutt in church in my upbringing.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Sam Hamstra — So I’ve been in a lot of different environments and seen to a lot of different things. And so it was really just kind of like looking like, how can we just be crystal clear on who we are, where we’re going and different things. And so I read that book and in that book, he actually laid out these questions that he was like kind of pointing to every successful organization needs to answer.

Sam Hamstra — And Iwas kind of seeing that with some of the stuff I’ve been hearing. And I’m like, and there’s a couple of missing pieces for me that he pointed to that I thought was so important in church world that I would actually point to that have been some of the biggest things I think that have been what I would call probably the secret sauce of what we’ve seen as far as clarity.

Sam Hamstra — Just the separation of something simple, but the difference between mission and vision, you know, why we exist compared to where we’re going. And so, yeah, I read that book and in there he laid out questions that you need to answer. I took that to our leadership team and we wrestled with these probably for about nine months.

Sam Hamstra — I’m just going back and forth on wording, how we say things. question by question in five different questions. We answered those and we gave it a name called the Anthem Way. And so that was the foundation, but I want to give credit where credit is due. It came through the book, The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni. Yeah.

Rich Birch — Yeah, no, that’s great. That’s fantastic. And I, you know, one of the things I love that you’ve hit on here is I’ve talked in other contexts that our vision, well, this is the problem with with vision, mission stuff is it’s like, first you have to have a conversation. How do you define vision? How do you define mission?

Sam Hamstra — Yeah.

Rich Birch — But the big thing that we’re called to, the big idea, it comes from Jesus, right? We’re supposed to reach people and grow them up in in in relationship with him. All churches should have that as their core. That is at the core of what we do.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah.

Rich Birch — But getting clear on how we do that, you know, these other questions I’m assuming has helped give you a bit of a more of an edge, something that’s a little bit different. Do you want to rattle through the five questions…

Sam Hamstra — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …and maybe some high level, I know we can’t get into all the detail, but kind of high level how you’ve answered it. And then the follow-up I’m going ask you is, which are those couple that have given you what you think are the biggest distinctives around Anthem…

Sam Hamstra — Yeah. Okay.

Rich Birch — …that kind of that that kind of, um you know, that provide that edge that’s a little different, you think.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah. So five questions and I’ll rattle them off quick. But so first one is why do we exist? Mission – the mission question, um which you just said it, I 100% agree, you know, every church really is called to the same thing. Let’s make disciples who make disciples, the Great Commission is still our first priority.

Sam Hamstra — And so the way we say that is to lead people to know Christ and make them known. That was something we just prayed into language. We want to share language that people could really rally around.

Sam Hamstra — Next question is how do we behave? The values question. We wanted to boil down in our culture those not aspirational values like truly who we are. So we boil those down to three things and wrestle with the language a lot. We wanted them actionable, but we choose joy. We love people and we believe passion.

Sam Hamstra — And those all have disclaimers and really feed into our culture of what we call multi-everything. We love people from all walks of life, belong before you behave, and all that falls in there.

Sam Hamstra — What do we do? Patrick Lencioni was talking about how that’s really your your business definition, so to speak, not for external use, but internal. We answered that with, we provide defined discipleship pathway.

Sam Hamstra — It’s what we do day in and day out. It’s why we wake up in the morning. We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel. We’re not a country club. We’re not here to make money, we’re a church and and this is this is how we do, like what we do to ah to reach our why.

Sam Hamstra — How we live is the spiritual question for us. We wanna make disciples. So we wanted to be able to weigh spiritually what a disciple is. And so we looked at Acts 2:42, which we felt like was a really good, definition of these handles on a disciple. And so we have five kind of disclaimers on what we want to see in our people at our church. And we offer resources on those, but from daily devotion to prayer to we share our Jesus story. How do you testify? How do we share? How do we make Christ known?

Sam Hamstra — And then the last one is where are we going, which is the vision question. And we’ve we’re wrestling with the timing right now. We currently have a 10 year vision statement, which is just kind of pointers on like, this is where we believe God is taking us as a people.

Sam Hamstra — And so those five questions are give us the framework for what we call the Anthem Way. What I’ve seen, as basic as it sounds and in our context. And I don’t know if this resonates with anybody. One of the most frustrating meetings I had in church context was the yearly calendar meeting.

Rich Birch — Yeah, so true.

Sam Hamstra — And I just felt like everybody was coming every year with their own ideas. Some of them had to do with our mission, some didn’t. And these are just in past experiences. And so it just felt like everybody was trying to, and some, you know, just different reasons, good, bad, indifferent.

Sam Hamstra — And what what gave me great clarity was to look at our defined discipleship pathway and say, this is how we create our calendar. And um that’s been one thing that has simplified everything for us.

Sam Hamstra — So every year in the last six years, our our yearly calendar flow has been the same. And our people are starting to understand it. The next steps fall within it when we even, you know, baptisms, we’re doing it this time. And So that’s been one thing is basically that sounds like what do we do?

Rich Birch — No, no, that’s good. I like it.

Sam Hamstra — I found a lot of confusion on that in the past, on like, how do we do groups? How do we have services? To define everything within that in the discipleship pathway, to me has been life-giving, not only for us as a team, but as as our church as well.

Rich Birch — Yeah. Pull that apart a little bit more. I think, because I think this is where we fall down on this type of work is, you know, and, and I know it’s none of the people that are listening in, but there are churches that like, they do a retreat and we’re like, we’re going away. We’re going we’re reading Lencioni. We’re going to define the five questions. We even make a snappy poster and we put it up on the wall. And then we go back to business as usual. It’s the same thing we’ve always done. But you’ve been able to make the connection there, particularly with the calendar.

Rich Birch — Maybe talk us through, give us some examples of how this work is shaping, how you’re actually defining, you know, how you operate as a church.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah, so one example I would say is prayer. I had somebody call me and I like to think our prayer culture is strong. And they said, how did you get your prayer culture strong? And I said, well, this is really mind blowing. We have a weekly prayer meeting.

Rich Birch — Right. Right.

Sam Hamstra — And so because of that, and and still as the lead pastor still today, I take responsibility for leading that because I believe it’s it’s a high value for the church.

Rich Birch — Right.

Sam Hamstra — So it’s on the calendar. We you know And we’re not adding to it. It’s just 6 p.m. to 7 every Thursday. And we support it, which I think is the secondary layer behind that because it’s important. Now we have staff support. We have worship team support. We’re, we’re like staying very focused, on a few things rather than getting broad and going to a retreat and saying, this is a silver bullet. I don’t think there, I think the whole thing is a silver bullet, the whole pathway.

Rich Birch — Right. Sure.

Sam Hamstra — And so we always say, you know, I took this from somebody, but, you know, we want to be Ruth’s Chris, not Ponderosa. We want a one page menu and we really want to just do that.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Sam Hamstra — And it might even get boring. And we we’re trying to learn that boring is good.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah. Boring stuff grows churches. I love it.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah.

Rich Birch — One of those five is sharing Jesus. Every disciple has one mission, to make Christ known. We don’t keep the gospel to ourselves. We share it through our words, our actions, our lives, wherever we go. We carry the hope of Jesus to a world that needs him.

Rich Birch — Unpack some ways that that value drives behavior at the church, that actually drives calendaring and and you know what you’re talking about, that sort of thing.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah, so deep, you know, we always want to empower everybody to be inviters and not just share. I think the key word in that is share your Jesus story. You know, we have to be people who understand how to share a testimony outside the four walls with it, you know, with a pretty quick invite to be like, hey, come be part of this community if you don’t have a community.

Rich Birch — Right.

Sam Hamstra — And so that is really through calendaring. We that’s really probably intrinsically baked into what we’re doing. So anytime I bring a guest to church, I’m saying it from the pulpit. And this is my friend. They’re here. I invited celebrating those through baptisms.

Sam Hamstra — We let people testify of so you’re hearing stories of that. And then really resourcing people to make Christ known by sharing their story, teaching them how to do that.

Sam Hamstra — So In the context of the calendar, um you know I took this from your playbook, sir, so thank you. We wanted to create four big events in our flywheel…

Rich Birch — Yep. Love it.

Sam Hamstra — …that are big invite events, that these are the moments where you need to bring 10 people.

Rich Birch — Right.

Sam Hamstra — We have found in our calendar since day one that we are seeing people respond to that and our church grows after every single time we do a big event.

Rich Birch — That’s great.

Sam Hamstra — And so we’re we’re doing four quarterly things.

Rich Birch — Are those are those four the same every year? Are they, are they, yeah.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah, yes.

Rich Birch — So what are they? What are those four? If you don’t want me asking.

Sam Hamstra — So, you know, Easter, of course…

Rich Birch — Yep.

Sam Hamstra — …summer kickoff was something we just created…

Rich Birch — Yeah, great.

Sam Hamstra — …to start the first Sunday of June. We rented a football field and we just say, bring everybody. We don’t…

Rich Birch — That’s great.

Sam Hamstra — …in our culture here, this is one thing, like, we’re like, we don’t shrink in the summer. This is a great time to grow.

Rich Birch — Keep going forward. Yep. Love it.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah. And then we created something years ago called Homecoming, just, you know, it was really show up Sunday, invite day.

Rich Birch — Yeah. Yep.

Sam Hamstra — And then Christmas.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Sam Hamstra — So those are our four homecomings in November on the calendar. It just kind of flows quarterly for us that way.

Rich Birch — That’s great. I love it. Well, I love what we’ve seen in fastest growing church in the country, friends that are listening in, is, you know, lots of churches will get, they have two big days, Christmas and Easter. But what we see is the behavior that you’re doing, which is you kind of end up having to make up a couple other days where you’re kind of injecting energy. We’re recording this in the summertime. You know, lots of churches have pulled a page out of Life Church’s book around At the Movies. And they, at the movies is one of their biggest attended days of the year on the the front end of that.

Rich Birch — It’s just made up. There’s no reason for you to come the first week of August…

Sam Hamstra — Yeah, absolutely.

Rich Birch — …but they’ve decided, hey, we’re going to do that. That’s great. So we’re going to link to your about page where a lot of this is on that that page.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah.

Rich Birch — On the how our core values, how we behave: We love people. We bleed passion. We choose joy. There’s some unique stuff in there. So talk me through. We love people, I think could be universally true of lots of churches…

Sam Hamstra — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …but I’m not sure that every church would say we bleed passion. We choose joy. Talk me through those as how those are kind of a unique thing that is helping you define what it means to be Anthem.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah, so you know on the love people thing, is you do hear that a lot. And I found there’s a difference between hearing it than living it out. And in religious environments sometimes, you know, I think we all pray we wanna reach the lost until you reach the lost.

Rich Birch — True.

Sam Hamstra — And our first service, our first Easter Sunday here, we only had one door into our auditorium. And I still remember we had the whole back of the auditorium smelled like weed.

Rich Birch — Oh, wow. Okay. Love it.

Sam Hamstra — And it was like this tense moment, you know, like of like, okay, this is what we pray for.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Sam Hamstra — And kind of diving deep into that. So we really own that language within that of we belong before we behave. And so we’re, you know, you can come from all walks of life and we believe Jesus died for all people. So we love all people.

Sam Hamstra — And then the we choose joy…

Rich Birch — I love that. Before we move on, the thing I love about that…

Sam Hamstra — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …that you’re calling out, that I do think is a nuance that we miss in too many churches, which is oftentimes we say we want to reach people. But what that comes with is messy pastoral care, hard conversations, stuff that doesn’t make sense, and long nights. Like, it’s just hard.

Rich Birch — And, um you know, if you’re, it’s easy to reach Christians from the other church across town. It’s hard to reach people who don’t normally journey in this stuff.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah. Yeah.

Rich Birch — And I love I love that story, even of your opening weekend with the the smell of weed in the back of the room.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah.

Rich Birch — I love it.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah. Definitely messy.

Rich Birch — That’s great. Yes, yes, love it.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah. You know, the “We choose joy” has just been, um i think one of the greatest testimonies we had was from somebody that just, it was their first time guest. So like, man, everybody feels like they’re the same here. Everybody’s so happy. And we just wanted to build in just this, we believe that, you know, joy should be a badge that every believer wears. It’s just been, you know, you go into the different environments and some people just, it seems like a chore to be alive.

Sam Hamstra — And so we just wanted to drive in. This is a privilege to be part of what God is doing in the earth in this hour, even if it doesn’t look perfect.

Rich Birch — That’s great.

Sam Hamstra — And then with “We bleed passion”, um that’s really our way to say here, you know, if you’re looking for a place that’s content with status quo, you’re probably not going to like it here. We’re always going to be changing. We’re always going to be moving. We’re always going to be shifting. We always want to go with where the Lord is leading. And so we’re a sending church. Don’t get comfortable. There’s always going to be more services. There’s always going to be new churches.

Sam Hamstra — So we tried to to really get that in the DNA from the front side.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. I love it.

Rich Birch — I love that “we choose joy”. When I was at Liquid Church, are one of our three in this in this coupling was “Church is fun”. And you know the way we would talk about that is we would say, you know we we we say good news or we say gospel. We’re like, we should be gospel people or we should be good news people.

Rich Birch — But what that actually means, how that actually should work itself out in our culture is when people interact with us, those people are a lot of fun to be around.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Because they’re redeemed people who have figured out, man, we’re following a God who loves us dearly. So what that should actually like, I love the way you’ve said it, we choose joy. Joy should be the natural outcome of our churches…

Sam Hamstra — Yes.

Rich Birch — …which is, again, that should not be rocket science, but it’s amazing how much that is a cultural difference or can be a huge cultural difference in many churches.

Sam Hamstra — Yes. 100%. Yep.

Rich Birch — That’s cool. So um you’ve been using this really throughout your how you develop leaders, how you onboard people, how you, you know, how do you come back to this time and time again? What are you using? How are you using these tools in your leadership development, in your raising up of volunteers, that sort of thing?

Sam Hamstra — Yeah, so foundationally, I got to give credit where credit is due once again on this. I heard University of Kentucky’s baseball coach say this about culture, and it was like the best thing I’ve ever heard. He totally transformed his program, and he said it was culture at at the root of it. He said culture is every day. Culture is what you accept, and culture is what you reinforce.

Rich Birch — It’s good.

Sam Hamstra — And so we try to keep that in front of us as much as we can. It’s you know not something we just say we want to lead the way every day. So within these three, we actually just came out with 10 leadership values that all fit within those three…

Rich Birch — Oh, that’s cool.

Sam Hamstra — …that give a little more language to our leadership, like, you know, we love people, so we park in back. And so really speaking to the culture of, you know, we put other people first, we serve.

Rich Birch — Oh, that’s good.

Sam Hamstra — And so, you know, we try to outdo each other. You know, I park about a half mile away from church on Sundays. We don’t we don’t do pastor parking, you know, or anything like that. umAnd so just, it’s every day.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Sam Hamstra — We do a value at every single one of our pre-service huddles on Sunday. So we’re taking those three values every Sunday, one, here’s what we’re doing.

Sam Hamstra — And then Leadership Pipeline, we implemented this two years ago and we’re teaching our Anthem way across the board to a new set of leaders three times a year. And so we really zone in on culture a lot. We’ve just realized people coming from a lot of different places and what makes our culture, our culture are these distinctives. And so we’re teaching those and then really trying to walk them out. And the best testimony we’ve been hearing is people say, yeah, we see that in the leadership of the church. So that’s been really cool to hear.

Rich Birch — That’s really cool. I love it. And friends, this just reminds me of the like such a foundational thing we’ve all got to get right and work on and then repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat.

Rich Birch — We’ve got to keep on top of this language and and just come back to it time and time again. So you’re multi-site, you’re you’re going to launch more campuses down the road.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah.

Rich Birch — How does this tie into that conversation around, you know, there can be in you know, some multi-site churches, there’s like this tension of uniformity, you know, versus autonomy. And like, how how does that how does how does your thinking work out with the Anthem Way in multiple locations?

Sam Hamstra — Yeah. So I want to preface this with I’m new, so I am figuring this out in real time.

Rich Birch — Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sam Hamstra — I’m coming from from being a campus pastor to now being in the position I’m in. We’re two years into our first ah plant location campus. So and we’ve seen it be successful.

Sam Hamstra — But what we’ve agreed on is we are going to be uniform in the Anthem Way. So we’re choosing uniformity and everything that falls within that box of the Anthem Way. Um, and so that has been like the running lanes for us to define what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, the way we talk, the way we move, our style of church, um, and all of that. So that’s been, you know, we’ve been really struggling with, with, with what you just said, that uniformity versus unity versus, you know, autonomy.

Sam Hamstra — And so, the Anthem Way is to become our framework on how we’re starting locations. And we feel like as long as everybody’s in sync with all, and it and it entails a lot, right? I mean, how we do church, our approach to a lot of things.

Sam Hamstra — And so that’s been that’s been our overarching theme is we want to be uniform in this.

Rich Birch — yeah that’s good.

Sam Hamstra — And so that’s what we’ve been trying to make sure it’s documented, ready to go.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, that’s an interesting, that’s like a, we could have a whole other half an hour just on on on that issue.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah.

Rich Birch — But one of the things we have seen over the long arc of the multi-site movement is churches that are choosing clarity and um and more, yeah, an understanding of, in your case, what is Anthem and how do we do what we do, those churches are the churches that, from my perspective, and not just statistically, are actually benefiting more from the multi-site movement.

Rich Birch — The churches where they’re like, hey, let’s spend a lot of time. It can actually be the worst model because it’s like, we have a lot of people thinking about all the different ways you could potentially do church. As opposed to saying, no, no, like this is the way we’re not, we’re not saying this is the best way. We’re just saying it’s our way. We’re not saying that this is the only way to do it.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah.

Rich Birch — We’re just saying this is the way we do it. And, um and we’re okay with that. We’re settled on on that as an issue.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah. That’s good. That’s good.

Rich Birch — That’s interesting. Is there anything that changed or that has changed as you, I realize you’ve influenced ben to this from the beginning, but like, has there been anything that has kind of changed as you got clearer on the Anthem Way over the over the years? You know, something you cut or improved or, you know, is there anything that jumps to mind on that front?

Sam Hamstra — Yeah, we’re would I might use the word refined rather than changed.

Rich Birch — Sure. Yep, that’s good.

Sam Hamstra — I was just talking to our discipleship director this morning just on, you know, is there is there a small group model? So like our three kind of handles in our discipleship pathway are know Christ, grow in Christ, and and make Christ known.

Sam Hamstra — And, you know, our small group model isn’t working. We added what we call the Mosaic School of Ministry, which is is another thing in Grow. And we’ve actually seen way more interest and success in that. And so, you know, we have a way higher percentage right now going through what we call a School of Ministry, which is classes and and discipleship then we’re getting in small groups.

Sam Hamstra — And so we’ve been just kind of wrestling with that a little bit. Like, is that culture, is it good, is it bad? And so I think those those refining moments have have really changed. We started off, though, I feel soft saying this, but it worked in our context. But we would start every year with 21 days of prayer and fasting in the beginning. And do 21 days again in the fall.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Sam Hamstra — We’ve actually gone down to seven days to start the year. There’s seven days in the fall. We just feel like we’re seeing actually better results with more people getting involved just with those minor tweaks, just to say this…

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

Sam Hamstra — …his is we’re we’re seeing bigger impact there.

Rich Birch — Sure.

Sam Hamstra — But so I think those refining things have been really good.

Rich Birch — Has there been any of that refining that has come not from you, but from a member of your team? Like, has anyone called you out or called the church out on like, hey, like on prayer or on any of these where, you know, like when that’s happened in my life, I kind of like that.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah.

Rich Birch — I’m like, oh, well, that’s a pleasant thing that just happened there, even though it feels weird to be the person being called out.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Have you had any experiences like that?

Sam Hamstra — Yeah. Yes. I’m laughing because, yeah, I’ve had quite a few. I could point to the one with prayer fasting.

Rich Birch — Yes.

So somebody on our team was like, hey, pastor, you know that there’s really no a place in the Bible where there’s a three week corporate fast.

Rich Birch — Sure.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah like where the whole church is coming together for three weeks and I’m like well I got a challenge, I’m gonna look. And I’m like sure enough you know, I’m maybe somebody could find it, but it was like these times and seasons where people come together for specific things of like, oh man you’re right.

Rich Birch — Yeah. Yeah, love it.

Sam Hamstra — So and so that was like one of those um yeah it’s it’s definitely happened quite quite a bit and so which I love that too and so it’s been such a blessing of solid team that feels free to speak when when they need to.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great. Well, this has been a good conversation, just as we’re kind of coming to land. If you think about a church out there that feels like okay they’ve listened to this and they’re like okay, we maybe they’ve opened up your website. And they’re like, hey, we’re not as clear on this that as we could be, we need to get much clearer on that.

Rich Birch — What’s kind of one first step that you would encourage people to take? What would be kind of the best first step towards getting clarity on this front?

Sam Hamstra — Write the vision, make it plain so that he that reads it may run.

Rich Birch — Dude, I love it. And with that, we end the episode. That’s fantastic. No, that’s great. Unpack that a little bit.

Sam Hamstra — Um, you know, I for so much of my life, I was always looking to be so unique and so different.

Rich Birch — Right.

Sam Hamstra — And I felt like I just needed the next best thing. And it was wasn’t until I just locked into this is what the Lord has for us. And it might sound like somebody else it might look and that’s OK, but this going to be very unique to us. And this is what we’re doing. And just to be very clear on that and then just this is for me, but I get bored so easily. And to just, just not get bored and just keep doing the same thing in the same direction day after day.

Rich Birch — Right.

Sam Hamstra — And in that that flywheel, to use your words, it does work. And just to see that go and to to get very clear and and simple and and let people know where you’re going and just keep saying the same thing over and over is so life-giving.

Rich Birch — That’s so good. So good.

Rich Birch — Well, I really appreciate you being here today. If we want to send people anywhere online to track with you or to track with the church, where do we want to send them?

Sam Hamstra — So first name, last name would be all my personal stuff. So @samhamstra, last name H-A-M-S-T-R-A.

Sam Hamstra — And all church stuff is weareanthemchurch.com. And then weareanthemchurch on social as well.

Rich Birch — Love it. So good. Appreciate that, Sam. Thanks so much for being here. Honored that you take some time to be with us today.

Sam Hamstra — Yeah, thanks so much, Rich, my honor.