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Welcome back to another episode of the unSeminary podcast. Today we’re joined by Jimmy Scroggins, Lead Pastor of Family Church in South Florida. Under Jimmy’s leadership, Family Church has grown into a network of over 20 congregations across multiple languages, all unified under one structure while maintaining local leadership and live teaching at every location.
Are you finding your church’s energy drifting in too many directions? Wondering how to keep your ministry focused while still doing all the “good things” churches are called to do? Tune in as Jimmy offers a clear perspective on why maintaining a relentless focus on the weekend experience is critical for sustained church growth.
- A network of neighborhood churches. // Family Church operates as one unified organization—one name, one budget, one leadership structure—but functions like a family of neighborhood churches. Each location has live preaching, local leadership, and contextualized ministry for its community. Like siblings in a family, each campus shares core DNA while expressing it differently based on context, language, and culture. This approach allows the church to scale while remaining personal and locally effective.
- Why Sunday still matters most. // One of Jimmy’s strongest convictions is that healthy churches must prioritize the weekend gathering. When growth slows, churches can be tempted to drift away from focusing on Sunday. Leaders may unintentionally elevate secondary ministries, such as midweek programs or community initiatives, because they feel like wins. However, if Sunday gatherings are not vibrant, engaging, and growing, the effectiveness of every other ministry will eventually decline as well. A healthy weekend service creates the momentum that fuels everything else, and secondary ministries all need to drive back to the Sunday experience.
- Creating alignment across multiple locations. // One way Family Church keeps the focus on Sunday, and maintains unity across a large multisite network, is through shared sermon planning, common teaching outlines, and collaborative preparation. While each pastor delivers messages in their own voice, the theological direction and structure remain consistent. At the same time, local campuses retain flexibility to adapt to their specific communities, ensuring both consistency and contextual relevance.
- Developing future leaders intentionally. // A key driver of Family Church’s growth is its leadership pipeline. The church utilizes internships, residencies, and student ministry roles to identify and develop future campus pastors. Notably, Jimmy views student pastors as potential senior leaders because their roles require a broad range of skills, from teaching and leadership to administration and pastoral care. By consistently investing in emerging leaders, the church creates a steady pipeline of capable pastors ready to lead new locations.
- Coaching for continuous improvement. // Teaching quality is a high priority, and every communicator receives regular coaching. Sermons are recorded, reviewed, and evaluated by trusted leaders who provide feedback and track growth over time. Jimmy himself participates in this process, modeling a culture of humility and continuous improvement.
- Refocusing requires difficult decisions. // For churches that have drifted away from prioritizing the weekend, Jimmy offers a caution: refocusing will require letting go of some good things. Leaders must carefully evaluate where time, money, and energy are being spent, and whether those investments are truly supporting the weekend experience and the church’s primary mission to make disciples.
To learn more about Family Church, visit gofamilychurch.org and explore their resources and annual leadership conference.
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Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: Risepointe
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Episode Transcript
Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. We’ve got a returning guest today, which, what does that mean? That means it’s somebody I want you to hear from again. Excited to have Jimmy Scroggins with us. He is the lead pastor at Family Church. They’re one of the fastest growing churches in the country with, if I’m counting correctly, 14 campuses in Florida, plus five locations in Spanish and a Portuguese location. That’s a lot of moving parts. Family Church is dedicated to building families in South Florida through a network of neighborhood churches. Jimmy became the lead pastor there in 2008. Super excited to have you on the show again today.
Jimmy Scroggins — Hey, man, always glad to be with you and appreciate what you do.
Rich Birch — Yeah, encouraging to see you as well again. So why don’t you bring people just up to speed for folks who haven’t been following along with Family Church. Give us a picture where things are at today, your 14 campuses, multiple locations. What’s a network look like today? Tell us all about that.
Jimmy Scroggins — Yeah, so actually, depending on how you can, you know, we use the word campus and church interchangeably. So although we are one church organization, one budget, one name, one leadership structure, one constitution and bylaws, we still function a lot from the perspective of an attender like likes independent churches because we have live teaching and live local leadership at every family church location.
Rich Birch — Yep.
Jimmy Scroggins — And so we have 20 locations.
Rich Birch — Okay.
Jimmy Scroggins — Then we have some additional, so because some of those are Spanish speaking…
Rich Birch — Yep.
Jimmy Scroggins — …yeah like Portuguese our Portuguese church has their own campus. A couple of our Spanish speaking churches have their own campus.
Rich Birch — Love it.
Jimmy Scroggins — Then a couple of them congregations meet on the same campus with an English speaking congregation.
Rich Birch — Okay. Yep.
Jimmy Scroggins — And so so that’s that’s where we’re at. We have all those different physical locations and several more coming online in the next 12 months or so.
Rich Birch — That’s fantastic.
Jimmy Scroggins — And we’re really excited about the opportunity that we have to reach people in South Florida. We are not a megachurch. We have but a budget and the total attendance of a megachurch, but that’s in the aggregate. Our largest attended campus on a strong Sunday that’s not Easter might have 1,800 people. Our next one might have 1,500. We have another one that runs about 900. And then the rest of them are like usually with t between 400 and 600. Yeah.
Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great. That’s really this neighborhood church vision that you’ve been talking about, right? Which is the idea, if I remember correctly, it’s a one hundred locations that you’re hoping for, you’re wondering, you’re asking the Lord. Tell us talk to us a little bit about that.
Jimmy Scroggins — We’re talking about a hundred congregations, so they don’t all have to be Family Church. So we felt that we also helped to plant a truly autonomous, independent churches that are not Family Church. And so between that and where we are now with our own locations, we think we’ve started out on 40 something…
Rich Birch — That’s amazing.
Jimmy Scroggins — …of these over the last 15 years or so.
Rich Birch — That’s great.
Jimmy Scroggins — And, You know, the number 100 is kind of aspirational. I don’t know if we’ll ever actually get 100.
Rich Birch — Right.
Jimmy Scroggins — But it’s it’s it’s close enough that we can measure progress, but far enough out there that it feels like, man, we’ve got a lot of work to do.
Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great. What what do you, this is like a sidebar question. How do you kind of define the difference between a Family Church, somebody that’s in the network or is a part of the Family Church versus a church plant?
Jimmy Scroggins — Sure.
Rich Birch — How do you think about the difference between those two?
Jimmy Scroggins — Well, I mean, again, our our main markers, the one thing that, well, we say what makes us one church or one church organization is we’d have one name. So like all of our Family churches, if if we do a strategic partnership or a merger with another church, they’re all going to become Family Church.
Jimmy Scroggins — We have one constitution and bylaws that we all share. We have one um leadership structure, so they’ll all come into the leadership rubric and structure of Family Church, and we have one budget. So we all pool our resources and then we dispense them to together to fund the work of the different locations that we have.
Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that. So…
Jimmy Scroggins — And because we have live teaching, too, you know, we we try not to use language. We usually will correct someone around here if they use language like the mothership…
Rich Birch — Right.
Jimmy Scroggins — …or the main campus because we don’t we don’t have that.
Rich Birch — No, no.
Jimmy Scroggins — You know, wherever you attend church, that’s your main campus. Whoever’s your pastor, your preacher, that’s who you want to hear.
Rich Birch — That’s good.
Jimmy Scroggins — That’s that’s your that’s your lead pastor.
Jimmy Scroggins — So we really try to think of it like that.
Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s cool. Yeah, there’s a lot there. And maybe we’ll have you on another time to talk about, you know, how you’re keeping those together and keeping them aligned and focused. Because there’s, you know, I think there’s a lot of people that would aspirationally say, hey, that would be great. But man, I’m just not sure the inner are workings of that. But that’s it for another day. So I’m already setting you up for the next conversation.
Jimmy Scroggins — All right. All right. Great. Look forward to it.
Rich Birch — But one of the things I’ve heard you talk about is, hey, you know, we got to stay focused on the weekends. We got to stay focused on Sunday mornings. That sounds simple, and the kind of thing, of course, that’s what we do. But what what were you seeing when you think, hey, we got to be focused on Sundays. We got to be focused on that experience as church leaders.
Jimmy Scroggins — One of the things that I’ve discovered over my, you know, I’ve been, I’ve been a ministry a long time. I’m 54 years old. This is the only kind of work I’ve ever really been in vocationally. So as I’ve watched, I’ve just watched churches always have this tendency to drift away from a focus and a value on what happens on Sunday morning and towards other things.
Jimmy Scroggins — Now, before anybody starts emailing you or emailing me or whatever, I understand. I want to say all, just please assume the best in terms of the caveats, right?
Rich Birch — Yep.
Jimmy Scroggins — I know that discipleship is the goal, not church attendance. This is not about nickels and noses and all that. That that is really not what I’m talking about.
Jimmy Scroggins — What I’m talking about is for a church to have an organizational drive, for a church to have an organizational forward momentum, they have to be succeeding and rallying people at their weekend services. That’s just the way that it is. If you don’t do that well, you are blunting the impact of everything else that you might be doing, whether it’s small groups or home groups or whatever else.
Jimmy Scroggins — And again, look, this is not the Bible. This is my opinion. If you, my opinions are all free. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to take it. But I do think that, I do think that in my experience just watching, and and what I watch is when churches begin to get into severe decline, what they do is they usually latch on to some other ministry that’s not Sunday morning…
Rich Birch — Right. That’s true.
Jimmy Scroggins — …so they can feel like they’re getting a win. And so they’ll start, you know, our, what’s really important around here is our Thursday night ministry to special needs kids.
Rich Birch — Yep.
Jimmy Scroggins — It’s our orphanage that we own in Haiti. It’s our soup kitchen where we feed the homeless every Monday. And all of those things are awesome things.
Rich Birch — Yeah, VBS in the summertime or yeah, whatever those kind of things.
Jimmy Scroggins — Yeah, there are things that the church should do, maybe where you are, and those are all godly things, good things, biblical things, faithful things. But the thing of it is, what I watch is churches latch on to those things because they stop believing they can succeed on Sunday morning, and those things take on greater and greater importance.
Jimmy Scroggins — But but what what churches find is that eventually, if you don’t make Sunday morning healthy and vibrant and growing, all of the other things that are the auxiliary ministries that are attached to that are going to go away also.
Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s, I love that. In fact, just recently I was with a church where we were talking about similar issues and they were talking about these other things they do. And I was challenging them very similarly. I was said like, listen, that all sounds great. But like, how can we take the energy you’re putting into that and focus it in on the weekend, focus it in on Sunday? What can we do to rather than because it feels diffused? It’s like, you know, you got all these other areas you’re you’re spending your time on.
Rich Birch — What does focus really look like for you as you’re coaching, even your team at Family? You say, okay what do what does it look like to kind of have a great weekend that feels like a win? What are some of those kind of telltale signs of, yeah, that that’s a that’s a congregation that’s focused on making that work?
Jimmy Scroggins — Well, I think I think there’s organizations such as 9Marks and others who have laid this out pretty clearly. What should be happening when a church is gathering regularly? And so I think I think others have done a really eloquent job of laying these kinds of things out. And I want to go ahead and say I’m for all of 9Marks and all that kind of stuff.
Rich Birch — Yep.
Jimmy Scroggins — And I really am from the heart. But I also would just say, in terms of some more pragmatic ways that you approach that, obviously being faithful to what the Bible calls a neighborhood church to do. But I think one of the ways i encourage pastors is agreeing that we’re going to be faithful theologically in every way. I want to try to create the kind of church that I want my family to grow up in.
Rich Birch — That’s good. That’s good.
Jimmy Scroggins — So I’ve got kids, I’ve got teenagers, when I had little ones, when I had preschoolers, what kind of preschool experience do I want my kids to have in a context of a faithful church?
Rich Birch — That’s good.
Jimmy Scroggins — What kind of children’s ministry experience? What kind of student ministry experience? What kind of music do I think that our family ought to be singing together when we gather on the Lord’s Day? What kind of sermon do I want my wife and my children, what kind of sermon do I need to be hearing when we gather on the Lord’s Day?
Jimmy Scroggins — And so that’s what I’m trying to think about. And what you’ll find is, you know, now I’m in a little bit of a different phase because now I have my kids and grandkids go to my church. So what kind of an experience am I hoping that my grandchildren are going to have in the context of a biblically faithful neighborhood church?
Jimmy Scroggins — And so I’ve just found that when you think of it like that, it clarifies a lot of things.
Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.
Jimmy Scroggins — And and it also lets you be authentically who you are. And what I found is that if I will help to create the kind of programming in the context of a biblically faithful church that I want my kids to experience, there’s a lot of people who actually have the same desires. And they might not even be able to articulate it because maybe they don’t have the training or they haven’t thought about it as hard as I have. But when they but become part of it they go, that’s what I’ve always been looking for right there.
Rich Birch — Right, right. Well, that’s part…
Jimmy Scroggins — And so that’s what that’s what I think.
Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that. It’s a part of being a leader, right, is to identify here are the things that are important to our organization and and how do we keep those front and center and keep them in front of people? And I love that just personal kind of reflection, even, hey, what what am I looking for and how does you know, what do I think God can use?
Rich Birch — Well, pivoting a slightly different direction, thinking about what you’re doing at Family Church, you know, when you’re running multiple locations in multiple languages. How do you keep this kind of focus consistent with across all your campus pastors who are leading in very different contexts? You know, I know you’re all in South Florida, but like it’s very different communities you’re in.
Jimmy Scroggins — That’s true.
Rich Birch — Talk us through how are you, how are you driving unity and continuing to make sure Family Church is Family Church.
Jimmy Scroggins — Well, a couple of things, Rich, you know, we’re multisite, but we, so, you know, our, our goal is always family resemblance, not cookie cutter and identical. So the way I think I’ve shared this with on your podcast before, but the Scroggins family, we have eight biological children. None of them are twins. They do have a look because genetics are real.
Rich Birch — Yes.
Jimmy Scroggins — But they don’t look alike and they don’t want to be alike.
Rich Birch — Right.
Jimmy Scroggins — They like being brothers and sisters. They like being part of the Scroggins family. If someone else picks on them, they tend to tribe up pretty quick. But there’s a healthy sibling rivalry among all of them. And that’s kind of my idea for how our family of neighborhood churches can work.
Jimmy Scroggins — is There’s a family resemblance. We’re all proud to be part of the family. We love each other a lot. We pull for each other really hard. There’s a healthy amount of sibling rivalry. We don’t like other people coming at our coming at our brothers and sisters. And so that’s kind of how I like to posture our churches as much as I can.
Jimmy Scroggins — And the way that we keep consistency and camaraderie and chemistry and hold each other accountable is we just have a lot…we call it meals, meetings, and retreats. So we have a lot of meals together. We schedule it. We budget for it. We have a lot of retreats together. We schedule it. We budget for it. We have a lot of face-to-face meetings, more than most churches or leaders would tolerate. But that’s part of how we create culture and how we cultivate culture together.
Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s very good. I love that. Actually, very similar Mark Jobe in Chicago. They have 20 some odd locations as well, all preaching locally.
Jimmy Scroggins — Yeah.
Rich Birch —And he gave a very similar answer. I said, how do you keep everybody together? And he would kind of look to like well, we all get together for lunch on Monday. That was that was his answer. You know, it’s very similar.
Jimmy Scroggins — Yeah. Yeah.
Rich Birch — Like, hey, we got to keep FaceTime with each other. We got to keep relationally connected.
Jimmy Scroggins — Yeah.
Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s that’s fantastic. What would you say some of the, when you say your campuses have a strong resemblance, sticking with the genetic.
Jimmy Scroggins — Sure.
Rich Birch — What are some of those markers of the strong resemblance that that are telltale for you?
Jimmy Scroggins — I mean, aside from the more superficial things like branding, right? Signage and branding. But also, I would say like our preaching. So we cultivate our sermon series together. Every preacher preaches in their own voice. umThey make every sermon their own, but we do collaborate. We create like a three or four or five point fill in the blank outline together that we all use. Then you have a lot of freedom beyond that, but that does keep a family resemblance.
Jimmy Scroggins — Um, even our music, we don’t all have to use the same songs. We don’t, it’s not always in the same style, but we do have a set of songs that we’re using each quarter. And, um, we tend to try to, people have freedom to, to add songs or do something, but we, we, we kind of agree on a catalog of songs that we’re going to focus on for the quarter.
Jimmy Scroggins — Our liturgy is similar. So we have certain, like an announcement video that we all play all every church, every campus does. So we all do the same call to worship, reading out loud together congregationally. And we all do the same benediction, you know, that we read out loud congregationally. We all take the Lord’s supper every week.
Jimmy Scroggins — We share our baptism. So like,whenever we baptize, we video all of them. And then the following week, those baptisms are shown at every location.
Rich Birch — Right.
Jimmy Scroggins — So we all rejoice in each other’s baptism. So those are just some things that we’re doing to communicate, hey, we’re all we’re all one.
Jimmy Scroggins — At the same time, again, if you go to some of our congregations that majority black, well, it feels like it. I mean, the music’s different. The the preaching style is different. The the the way people react in the room is different. Obviously, if you’re Brazilian and you’re speaking Portuguese, obviously, if you’re, and even our Hispanic churches… One the things I discovered—I didn’t know this because I’m such a redneck—but when I come down here to South Florida, I did not realize that Hispanic is not actually all one thing. There’s actually a lot of different countries that speak Spanish…
Rich Birch — Right. Sure.
Jimmy Scroggins — …and they speak Spanish differently. And they actually like, they’re different.
Rich Birch — Right.
Jimmy Scroggins — And so I did not know that. And I never thought about it. And so even those congregations may have some differences.
Rich Birch — Some differences. Yeah.
Jimmy Scroggins — So that’s how we that’s how we do it.
Jimmy Scroggins — Try to maintain family resemblance. Try to maintain Sunday morning excellence. At the same time, giving the preachers and the congregations freedom to reach their own neighborhoods for Christ.
Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s fantastic. I’d love to double click on the Sunday morning excellence piece, particularly around teaching. So I get that you’re doing, you know, the kind of team teaching in a sense, here’s the three or four points, we’re kind of all heading in the same direction. What are you doing to ensure that that part of what you do, we know that’s critically important for all our churches, that that part is as high quality as it can be, you know, it’s it’s kind of as engaging as it can be.
Rich Birch — What are you doing um from a feedback, coaching, you know, maybe even selection of those campus pastors or the people that are speaking? you wouldn’t call them campus pastors, lead pastors. What are you doing on that front to ensure that that is as high quality as it can be?
Jimmy Scroggins — Well, we have a system for that. So we have a couple of guys. We have three or four guys in our church or pastors here that are very gifted and not only in teaching and preaching, but they’re gifted coaches. And so we have a system and I, and a regular rhythm where everyone videos their sermons and then they they email their manuscript and their video to these coaches and then they get feedback. But then they sit down and actually watch the video and get personal feedback from these coaches. And they do this several times a year.
Jimmy Scroggins — And we keep a running log on here’s some things that we’ve asked them to work on and improve. And so then when we come back the next time, did they work on these things and are they improving? And so those are the kinds of it’s not perfect, but it is a it is a serious mechanism that we have where…
Rich Birch — Yeah.
Jimmy Scroggins — And I do it, too. I submit to it as well. We all get coached and we all get better.
Rich Birch — I love that. Actually, this is now the second church. I literally was talking to a church earlier this week that is pursuing a secondary communicator to do exactly this. So it’s actually not the lead pastor who they’re who they’re kind of charging with this coaching role on communicators. Talk to me about that. That’s an interesting decision because I think a lot of people would assume, oh, that must be Jimmy’s job. He’s going to be coaching all these people. But talk to me about about your decision to have them do that.
Jimmy Scroggins — So one of the things that I do in a church like ours is I delegate a lot of things, but I do not delegate the teaching ministry of the church. So every week, if you go to our, you know, every week I meet for about two hours with everyone who’s preaching this weekend.
Rich Birch — Okay.
Jimmy Scroggins — So they’re all in that meeting. We’re talking through the sermon. We’re developing this outline. I do that myself. I personally lead the preaching retreats. We have two a year where we’re laying out our calendar. So we’re always 18 months out on our preaching calendar.
Rich Birch — Yeah.
Jimmy Scroggins — And so those are, that’s just something I, I don’t want to delegate. Um, the teaching ministry of the church belongs to me in terms of responsibility, for the ah oversight of it.
Jimmy Scroggins — And so that’s how we do that.But in terms of the coaching, these are all men that I’ve known for a long time that I trust a lot.
Rich Birch — Right. Right.
Jimmy Scroggins — We’re theologically aligned.
Rich Birch — Yep.
Jimmy Scroggins — I know the kind of feedback that they are likely to give. I trust it a lot. I know how they do it because I submit to it myself. And part of the reason that I do it is I want to get better. And part of the reason I do it is I want to interact with the coaches.
Rich Birch — Right. Yeah, that’s good. That’s great.
Jimmy Scroggins — So I, yeah. And so it is my responsibility. But the other thing is, you know, Rich, on coaching, whether it’s student ministry, kids ministry, you know, I’m I’m an ex-athlete. And one thing that athletes do, they get coached all the time, and they get coached by people who usually can’t do what they’re being coached to do.
Rich Birch — That’s true.
Jimmy Scroggins — So like, you know, when Tom Brady was at his height winning Super Bowls, not one of his coaches could have played quarterback as well as him, but he got coached every week.
Jimmy Scroggins — When Tiger Woods was at his peak of golf, he flew Butch Harmon, his swing coach, around his jet. And if Butch could play golf as good as Tiger Woods, he’d have won the Masters.
Rich Birch — Right.
Jimmy Scroggins — But he was his coach. And so somebody doesn’t have to be better than you to coach you.
Rich Birch — That’s good. That’s great insight for sure. And, and yeah, that the analogy of, yeah, somebody that’s professional at what they’re doing is getting coaching right in there. And it’s a different skillset than the, the same is true the other way. There’s a lot of people that are pro-athletes who can’t make the jump to coach. They just can’t do that. They…
Jimmy Scroggins — That’s correct.
Rich Birch — …you know, that’s like a different, it’s a totally different skillset than, than doing the thing that we’re talking about. What about the these key staff, campus pastors in these locations? How are you where are you finding them before they join the team? Are they coming up within? Are you you know what what’s that look like? How are you how are you finding these individuals to lead?
Jimmy Scroggins — Yeah.
Rich Birch — I know this real pressure point a lot of multisite churches.
Jimmy Scroggins — Yeah, well it’s a pressure point for us, too. And we never have enough.
Rich Birch — Right.
Jimmy Scroggins — But I will say we work at it. So we have an internship program that’s year round. So we’re trying to cultivate college age kids, not because we’re going to hire them necessarily. We hire some, but so that we have a pool of people that we know that are in their 20s that may have an interest in vocational ministry.
Jimmy Scroggins — We bring in, in the summers, a cohort of outside college students who are from all over the country. Again, it’s kind of like an eight week where we invest in them, but it’s an eight week job interview also. And so at the conclusion of that, we’re sitting down with our team and going, okay, is there anybody that was here this summer that we would want to hire? Stuff like that.
Jimmy Scroggins — We do have a residency program here in English and Spanish. So we’re cultivating, these are for people who are beyond college age and these is our residency is primarily aimed at people who already live here and who are engaged in a career that’s not vocational ministry. And people who are, it’s usually, we’re we’re looking for people who are at a point in their career or their business where they have a lot of control over their own schedule.
Rich Birch — Right.
Jimmy Scroggins — And then we give them some training. It’s a two year residency program. And then some of them become pastors or lay ministers. Some of them become just highly trained volunteers. That’s another avenue.
Jimmy Scroggins — And then we’re networking all the time. So we’re working hard. We try to enter our team and cohorts. We try to travel and be there for college fairs and other things. Because we have to work hard so we have a Rolodex of people that we can call on when when we when we need someone to come fill fill a role.
Rich Birch — And out of those, well, first of all, super commendable that you have lots of different avenues. And lots of times when I ask your church that question, they’re like, well, we do this one thing and it’s not working. It’s like, okay…
Jimmy Scroggins — Yeah.
Rich Birch — …well, it takes more than one thing. You got to do a bunch of different things. Which of those has been the most effective or most fruitful for, or is it kind of a scattershot? It’s all of it for…
Jimmy Scroggins — Yeah.
Rich Birch — …you know, identifying particularly key leaders.
Jimmy Scroggins — They’re all fruitful in different ways. One of the things that we do is we use our student ministry. So when we have full-time student ministers, which we have a bunch of them, we really don’t hire somebody to be full-time as a student pastor unless we think they could be a campus pastor or lead pastor.
Rich Birch — That’s good.
Jimmy Scroggins — So it doesn’t mean that they will be, but every single person we hire, we think this person’s got the gift mix, they’ve got the teaching gift, they’ve got the want to, they’ve got some administrative ability, they’re a good convener, people tend to come around them. And so we’re trying to identify those people who may not be ready yet in terms of experience or age or family development or whatever, to be a lead pastor, but we want to identify people who we think are on that trajectory, put them in those slots.
Jimmy Scroggins — And we do that because student ministry, you know, I was a student pastor for a long time. Student ministers do basically everything that a lead pastor does. They have to prepare messages. They have to rally volunteers. They have to arrange music. They have to oversee events. They have to do funerals and weddings. They have to do counseling. They have to deal with discipline problems. So student pastors, and they have to do it all on shoestring. They tend to be really good at senior pastor stuff after they’ve been doing it for a while. So that’s why we do it that way.
Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great. I love that. I love the, just even the clarity of identifying, Hey, we know that the people in this, you know, in this role, those are all people who eventually we could see, you know, if they keep developing, they could be in these roles. That’s a, that’s, that’s fantastic.
Rich Birch — Well, this been a fantastic conversation. Getting back to the kind of Sunday focus question. if, if I’m a church leader and I think, man, I think we’re maybe a bit off focus on some stuff. We’re not, we’re not putting enough energy into the weekend. What would your recommendation be to them for pulling back on other things? How do you actually do that in a way that you know doesn’t kind of kibosh? How do we make that transition in a way that that actually propels the church forward rather than you know hindering us? Any thoughts on that?
Jimmy Scroggins — Yeah, that’s probably a whole nother podcast, Rich.
Rich Birch — Yes.
Jimmy Scroggins — But just in brief, I would just say you need to do that very wisely because what you’re going find out is in order to refocus, you’re going to have to either de-emphasize or stop doing something else. And that something else is probably a really good thing that some Christian somewhere ought to be doing. And your church has a constituency of people in it who are super passionate about that thing.
Rich Birch — Right.
Jimmy Scroggins — And so you gotta be really wise because you just go ripping and slashing, um you’re gonna undercut your own leadership credibility. And in some situations you might undercut your leadership opportunity.
Jimmy Scroggins — And so you gotta be really wise about that. But I think minimally, if you could just assess it. So years ago I heard a guy that was really good at organizational leadership. He said, he said if you brought in a consultant from outside and he didn’t know anything about your church, and he didn’t care about anything about it. And he just assessed it and said, you should stop doing this, you should start doing that, you should fix this, you should fire them, you should hire them. He goes, why don’t you just think about what that guy would say and then do it.
Rich Birch — Right. Yes.
Jimmy Scroggins — So I think there’s a part of that where even if you can’t wisely do everything all at once, I think there is a sense in which you should at least be able to identify what those things would be if you could. And then you begin to chip away at it.
Jimmy Scroggins — So the way, I mean, just real clarity is just like, hey man, where’s the money? How who how many how many staff dollars or budget dollars are flowing towards helping Sunday morning succeed and how much of it is flowing elsewhere?
Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.
Jimmy Scroggins — How many staff members and how many staff hours are directed at other programming versus Sunday morning programming? How much of your brain space as a senior leader is being occupied by other ministries versus Sunday morning?
Rich Birch — That’s good.
Jimmy Scroggins — And I would just say it doesn’t mean that it should be zero. It just means the clear priority in my mind should be your weekend gatherings. And then a very simple, like a very practical example of how this might work out is let’s take student ministry. So I did that for a long time.
Jimmy Scroggins — A lot of churches on like their midweek program on Wednesday nights, whatever night it is, they have a huge group, two or three or four times bigger than the student ministry group that meets on Sunday mornings. Okay, and why is that? Well, we’re reaching the community. Okay, maybe. Maybe you got a bunch of kids that aren’t Christian or whatever, and they come to your thing because it’s fun. and Maybe you’re also collecting some kids from other churches whose youth group isn’t as good as yours, or maybe they don’t have one, or, you know, whatever. There’s there’s a lot of reasons why the youth group on the midweek is is big, and there’s nothing with that.
Jimmy Scroggins — But I would just say, my so what I tell my youth pastors is, look, get the biggest group you can on Wednesday nights. I love it. Blow it out. I’m just not evaluating you on that. I’m evaluating you by how many students are here on Sunday mornings.
Rich Birch — Right.
Jimmy Scroggins — Because because Sunday morning kids come with their families and families are what build churches.
Rich Birch — Right. Right. That’s good.
Jimmy Scroggins — Now they’re going push back and say, so you don’t care about reaching all these lost kids at our public school. No, I actually really do, which is why if that’s something that we’re really passionate about, why don’t you get a job with FCA or Youth for Christ or First Priority? Let’s fund you and, man, knock yourself out as a missionary to the public schools.
Jimmy Scroggins — But what we’re trying to do at Family Church is make disciples. And the way we do that is building families. It doesn’t mean that we won’t have kids whose parents don’t go to church. We will and we do. But what I’ve learned over many years is all that activity around people who never whose parents never come bears very minimal fruit compared to the energy we put into parents whose kids do come or likely to come. Those that fruit tends to remain.
Jimmy Scroggins — I know we’ve all got anecdotal stories. I do too.
Rich Birch — Yes.
Jimmy Scroggins — And I know you know I am 100% in favor of student ministry as a missions enterprise, and we want to reach kids and baptize kids. I’m for all of that. We baptize a lot around here. At the same time, everyone at our church knows I’m being evaluated by what happens on Sunday morning. So what I’m doing on Wednesday really needs to be a funnel where I’m catching kids and bringing them into our true discipleship matrix, which is um Lord’s Day worship. So whether they have they’re with their parents or not.
Jimmy Scroggins — A Christian who says, I’m a Christian, I’ve been baptized, but I don’t participate in Lord’s Day worship with a neighborhood church. That’s not a, that’s not, they’re not following a biblical pattern and that’s what we’re trying to get kids. So that that’s just an example of how an emphasis on the weekend might flesh out in a local church.
Rich Birch — I love the clarity there. And I love the like, hey, you can do that thing, but we got to make sure that there’s a connection between that and this. And if we can’t show that we’re that this thing is going to drive to that thing, to the weekend, we you know, you you probably don’t want to be doing that. I think the clarity that you’re giving your people, I think, is a huge gift there. That’s that’s fantastic.
Rich Birch — Well, Jimmy,
Jimmy Scroggins — Well, you know, it’s one of the things about what I do is I always sound like I’m 100% positive and like I know what I’m doing. Just to be clear, hey, man, other people do it different. God blesses it.
Rich Birch — Sure. Yeah, yeah.
Jimmy Scroggins — Praise God for it.
Jimmy Scroggins — This is how we do it at Family Church. I don’t think it’s the only way to do it.
Rich Birch — Right. No, that’s great. And in fact, actually, that’s a telltale sign I’ve seen in lots of churches would say, would have that same humility to say, hey, we know there’s lots of different ways to do it. This is the way that we’re doing it.
Jimmy Scroggins — Yeah.
Rich Birch — This is what we believe God’s called us to. But we’re that means we’re called to this thing. We’re going to do it this way.
Jimmy Scroggins — Right.
Rich Birch — And that clarity, rather than like, hey, we’re always every six months, we’re trying something different. I think that just drives in too many weird directions and the church doesn’t end up being focused enough.
Jimmy Scroggins — Yeah.
Rich Birch — So yeah. Yeah, I really appreciate your clarity, Jimmy. Well this has been a fantastic conversation today. Any kind of last words as we wrap up today’s conversation?
Jimmy Scroggins — Yeah, I would just say again, if you’re a church leader, my my humble encouragement to you is make Sunday morning the best thing that you do. Put your primary and energy into that. And if your Sunday morning is vibrant and healthy and growing and people are being encouraged and taught and trained and they’re serving, then what you’re going to find is all of the other things that you want to do and should do outside of that are likely to be healthier.
Rich Birch — That’s great. Thanks so much. If people want to track with you or with the church, where do we want to send them online?
Jimmy Scroggins — You can go to our website, gofamilychurch.org. We have some podcasts as well. Church for the Rest of Us is one. We’ve got another one for ladies called Mom Village. Check all that out. And and we love to connect.
Jimmy Scroggins — We also have a we have a we have a conference every March. It’s a one-day conference, very affordable, small, no green rooms, no VIP treatment. But we want people to come with us, make friends with us, and talk church.
Rich Birch — That’s great.
Jimmy Scroggins — And you can check all that out online or on our website.
Rich Birch — Love it. We’ll link to all that in the show notes. I appreciate you, Jimmy. Thanks for being here today.
Jimmy Scroggins — Always. Thanks so much, Rich. Appreciate it.
