The Problem Your Church Can Feel but Can’t Name with Gavin Adams

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Welcome back to another episode of the unSeminary podcast. We’re talking with Dr. Gavin Adams, author, ministry consultant, leadership coach, and founder of Accelerate Consulting Advisory. Gavin previously served for 13 years as lead pastor of Woodstock City Church, where attendance grew from 200 to 8,000. Today, he works with churches around leadership strategy, organizational health, and clarity.

Has your church become more complex than it needs to be? Are you running good programs that may no longer be moving the mission forward? Tune in as Gavin shares practical ways to rethink your ministry model, simplify your church’s pathway, and make sure everything you do helps people take meaningful steps toward Jesus.

• Your problem may be design, not passion. // Gavin often works with churches that deeply care about reaching people but still feel stuck. In many cases, the issue isn’t a lack of vision, theology, or commitment. It’s organizational design. Churches can have the right mission and still struggle because their structures, systems, and ministry models are no longer helping them execute that mission effectively.
• Stay married to the mission, not the model. // Every ministry model is created for a specific moment. Even a model that once worked perfectly can become outdated as the community, culture, and church change. Gavin encourages leaders to “date the model, not marry the model.” The mission remains constant, but the strategies and structures used to accomplish it should remain flexible.
• Beware of accumulated complexity. // Most churches don’t intentionally become complicated. They simply keep adding good things to meet legitimate needs. Over time, those programs, events, and ministries stack on top of one another until the church becomes busy without necessarily becoming more effective. Gavin challenges leaders to recognize that good activities can still compete with better, more mission-critical priorities.
• Put the mission on the whiteboard. // A practical first step is to reduce your mission to about eight words or fewer and then list everything your church currently does. Evaluate each program, event, and ministry against that mission. Does it clearly move the mission forward? If not, leaders should honestly ask why they continue doing it rather than automatically carrying last year’s calendar into the next year.
• Build a moving sidewalk, not a buffet. // Gavin compares an effective discipleship pathway to a moving sidewalk. Once someone steps onto it, the next step should feel clear, logical, and increasingly move them toward spiritual growth. Churches often create too many disconnected options instead. The goal is not to offer everything possible but to design a clear pathway that helps people know what their next step should be.
• Become person-centric instead of church-centric. // Churches often begin with what they want to offer and then ask who it might serve. Gavin recommends reversing that process. Start with the person you are trying to reach, understand where they are spiritually, and then design ministry around helping them move forward. Discipleship is simply helping people take incremental steps toward becoming more like Jesus.
• Use the five rights. // Gavin’s framework asks whether the right person receives the right message at the right time, in the right way, leading to the right next step. Those questions help leaders evaluate both existing ministries and new ideas. Not everyone needs the same ministry experience. Someone exploring faith may need a low-commitment serving opportunity, while a mature believer may be ready for leadership or deeper responsibility. Gavin encourages churches to consider both the step they want someone to take and the best way for that individual to take it based on where they currently are spiritually.
• Start with fresh eyes. // Redesigning a ministry model can be difficult when leaders are immersed in the current system. Gavin recommends involving an outside facilitator, consultant, or strategic leader who can help the team ask hard questions objectively. Fresh perspective can reveal complexity and assumptions that insiders have learned to accept as normal.

To learn more about Gavin Adams and his work with churches, visit gavinadams.com or follow him on Instagram. Download an excerpt of his book, RE:MODEL: Five Questions That Reshape How You See and Build Your Church. Or purchase the book on Amazon for a step-by-step framework for evaluating and rebuilding your ministry model around the mission.

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Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: Portable Church

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Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. Listen, we’ve got a return guest today, which what that means is, you know that I really love this person, think they’ve got a lot of good things to say to you. Doesn’t happen very much, but I’m really excited to have this guest back. And you need to lean in today because I think what this person has diagnosed, there are churches that are listening in today that are wrestling with. In fact, I know that’s true. There are churches that are, there might be something going on in your church that you might not be able to name that we’re going to name today, that if you could really wrestle it down, could make a real huge difference in your church.

Rich Birch — And so you’re not going to want to miss today’s conversation with Dr. Gavin Adams. He’s an author, communicator, ministry consultant, leadership coach, and the founder of Accelerate Consulting Advisory. He works with pastors around leadership strategy, church health, organizational clarity. He previously was the lead at Woodstock City Church in Woodstock, Georgia for 13 years. During that time, the church church grew from 200 to 8,000 in weekly attendance, which is staggering. Gavin, welcome to the show. So glad you’re here.

Gavin Adams — Hey, I appreciate that. That bio sounds way better than it actually probably is. But good to see you again.

Rich Birch — I appreciate you coming back on. Tell us a little bit, fill in the picture since we last talked, what’s what’s going on in Gavin’s world?

Gavin Adams — Yeah, yeah, lots of great stuff. My family stuff is probably my favorite thing that’s happening. You know, we we love that. I’ve got two little grandkids now, which makes me feel very old, but I’m very, very grateful. And my kids are all love each other, and we get to spend time with them. And I’ll tell you, that’s wonderful. And I love so much getting to work with pastors and churches around, really, I guess, around the world at this point.

Gavin Adams — And watching what God is doing in different contexts, but also helping diagnose what’s working, what’s not working, how do we make things better, knowing, you know, I think we all believe this, that the the mission of the local church is the most important mission in the city. And so how do we ensure and this is my bent for sure but how do we ensure that the organization is functioning in the most healthy, most dynamic way possible so that that mission can come to fruition, that we don’t leave anything on the table because eternity is at stake, right?

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Gavin Adams — I love getting to do that. I get to do it every single day. And that’s my favorite it’s my favorite thing about my job.

Rich Birch — Love it. So good. And we want to take advantage of the fact that you’re here today as a coach/consultant to so many churches across the country, around the world. Like you said, we want to tap that expertise and hear what you’re hearing and help the churches that are are listening in. You sit with a lot of leaders, a lot of pastors, and you have a lot of conversations. When a church picks up the phone or emails you, they call you. What’s going on? What’s happening there that they reach out to you?

Gavin Adams — Yeah, there’s there’s one of a couple of things it usually comes down to. Most everyone I talk to is typically growth-oriented, and I don’t mean necessarily numerically growth-oriented. But the pastors I tend to work with or who reach out are pastors who are who care deeply about their community, about the local church, but also care about seeing people grow in their faith, unreached people be reached.

Gavin Adams — And so there is this kind of dynamic of progress right in their heart. And they’re putting people first, but they want to see people making progress. And so I end up talking to lots of churches where that is happening in some dynamic ways, but it has become really complex, right, as as things have scaled, lots of complexity and and there’s just chaos that happens around that. So helping them kind of cut through all that complexity to find some clarity and alignment, organizational, again, organizational leadership stuff.

Gavin Adams — And I see a lot of churches that have a huge heart that are also stuck. Potentially maybe things were working really well in the past, or they’re they know that things should be working better. They have a sense that things just aren’t moving as either as fast as they think it could. Or and you know this, Rich, you bump into these people all the time as well, amazing leaders and pastors who just aren’t sure if they’re working on the right things the right way.

Gavin Adams — And so they look around, they see other churches that seemingly are doing something that’s working, and so they try to copy it, yet they’re in a completely different context. They see something that’s a dynamic somewhere else, but they aren’t sure how to do it in there. There’s different resource allocation.

Gavin Adams — So there’s so much of of this desire to see things be better, but not necessarily knowing how to get there or even what better, you know, quote unquote, looks like in their context, right?

Rich Birch — Right. Right.

Gavin Adams — In in their space. And so I tend to work with pastors who are in that, you know, I know that’s probably a broad brush in a way, but in that kind of, in that world.

Rich Birch — No, that makes total sense. The thing that stood out to me there was this idea of complexity and chaos. I feel like. man, that happens as a church grows, and you have a lot of executive pastor types listening in…

Gavin Adams — Yeah.

Rich Birch — or operational leaders or lead pastors that are asking similar kind of questions. You know, we often talk about leading at the intersection of vision and execution. And man, things can get complex. Chaos can come in.

Rich Birch — When you start to dig into that, you start kind of trying to understand what’s going on under the hood a little bit beyond just the first couple calls. What do you usually find underneath of that? What’s what’s what’s driving all that?

Gavin Adams — Yeah, I actually find that the pastors kind of know what the problem is. They don’t know how to articulate it.

Rich Birch — Right.

Gavin Adams — But they have a sense of what’s happening without knowing what it is, which, of course, you can’t you know fix something that you can’t name, right? So I rarely talk to pastors who are struggling with you know passion or have theological problems, doctrinal stuff, you know whatever. In the organizational side of the church, you know, the the church is an organism, right? But you’ve yet to see a healthy organism that is disorganized, right? Think about our bodies, right. So are bodies are organisms that are run by systems right that are highly organized.

Gavin Adams — And so when we think about the local church, it’s the same thing. The issue is really a design issue. It’s not a passion issue, we want to reach the community issue, we want to see people grow—all of that is innate in them. It’s the calling that God has placed in their lives. So they’re in these churches for that calling, but how do we execute that calling? How do we turn that calling into reality, the vision into fruition?

Gavin Adams — And as you mentioned, it’s execution, but how do we do that well? How do we think about this correctly? How do we contextualize it, as I mentioned earlier? And the good news about all of that is that those are all design questions. Those are structural design questions. And design questions always have answers to them, which makes this possible. That’s the thing I love about the conversation with these kinds of pastors is that we’re not looking at something that doesn’t have a solution.

Gavin Adams — Now the solution isn’t cookie cutter, right? But it is a design conversation, which means there there is a structural solution that we can find.

Rich Birch — So talk to me about what might be off in the design. You didn’t say this, but what that led me to is this idea that like all of us have systems. We have a design in the back end.

Gavin Adams — Whether we know it or not, right?

Rich Birch — Yeah, whether we know it or not, whether it’s named or not, whether it’s on purpose, it’s there.

Gavin Adams — Right.

Rich Birch — What could be what could have gone wrong with the design side, the design elements? that we have as an organization that could be leading us in the wrong direction.

Gavin Adams — Yeah. Yeah. Well, let’s let’s call design like model, right?

Rich Birch — Yep.

Gavin Adams — Like in a church, we have ministry models or you know whatever. And that’s just another word for strategy or plan or whatever. But every ministry model was, and I think this is probably true, was designed with some really intentional thought behind it, in most cases, almost all cases.

Gavin Adams — The hard part of it is that the minute you design a model, you’re in a moment when you design it, right? Whatever moment in time you’re in, you design a model, and that model might be perfect for the moment you’re currently in. However, the next day, that model is a little antiquated because that moment has shifted. Now, granted, it’s been a day.

Gavin Adams — But add up a week or a month or a few years or even decades, right? So many churches right now, and I understand why, but they are operating out of ministry philosophies or ministry models that were designed, I mean, I want to say before the internet, which is crazy. But some of them were designed in the 80s, in the 70s…

Rich Birch — Right. Right.

Gavin Adams — …and they’re still operating, and they have slightly tweaked the model. But their approach hasn’t really evolved as the moments in their community have evolved. And so, you know, we we talk about this a lot, right? Being, you know, married to the the mission and not to the model, dating the model, not marrying the model.

Gavin Adams — The model is just a tool. You know, the model is like a building. You know, the building is a church. The building is just a tool we use to execute ministry. And so our model, our plan is the same way. And so what happens in so many churches—and I think this is one of the reasons churches get stuck so much—is that the model that got created in time, and let’s just assume it was a perfect model, but it was created in a moment to serve a moment. And then as time has gone on, we don’t really rethink the model as much as we just add some things to it to maybe meet needs in the moment. But the problem is now we have accumulated all of this stuff on layers and layers on top of the model to where, again, it’s not even codified anymore because we can’t document it.

Gavin Adams — Because again, it has been almost, it’s like a house that had a foundation and then we kept laying more and more foundations of paint on it, right? And now the room has gotten real small because we have 48 layers of paint. Right.

Gavin Adams — And the original model was probably a really good model in the beginning. But we don’t feel like we can change it. Maybe we’re afraid to really peel that paint back and see what could be done differently. So we keep doing what we’re doing, adding a little bit at a time to make it meet the need in the moment. But then we end up with you know the grand buffet of a model, which is really lots of stuff, lots of busyness, but not necessarily the most effective way to run ministry.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I was actually talking, I was thinking about you this week. I was talking to a leader at a church and was thinking about this idea of accumulation like we just… And when they were describing their church, that was what they were describing. It was like, we’ve bolted on all these different things. It’s like, we bolted on a bit of this and a bit of that and a bit of this. And before you know it, you’re like, obviously this whole this whole thing is slowing down, right?

Gavin Adams — And good things, right? That’s the problem.

Rich Birch — Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. That’s why you bolted them on.

Gavin Adams — Like we don’t bolt on things… That’s right. Yeah, they’re all good things that meet legitimate needs in this moment…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Gavin Adams — …but could be working against better things that are more missional for you and your organization, right? That’s the hardest part of this.

Rich Birch — Right. Absolutely. So let’s assume that there’s a leader that’s listening in they’re saying, okay, I can see that. I see that. Oh my goodness, where we’ve accumulated. We’ve got a bit of these, a bit of this, a bit of that. And I need to step back and redesign, you know, get back to first principles. Where does the redesign actually start? How do we start this kind of process?

Gavin Adams — Yeah, well, that’s a hard question, and it takes some real guts and some, you know, ah instincts on the leader, but to recognize it and then do the hard work of doing it, right?

Gavin Adams — I think of this, maybe the simplest analogy for those of us that are in pastoral ministry, even if you don’t preach a lot, but you understand this part of it. When we preach, There’s a lot of things we can say. But the best messages have one point that point us to one clear principle. Now several application points and things like that, but we have one core principle that we’re pointing to.

Gavin Adams — In our church, that’s the same thing. Our ministry model, right, is built for one thing, and it’s the mission. And we all have the same mission overall. We put some different words to it, but our mission kind of is basically the Great Commission. We just label it differently.

Gavin Adams — And so the best thing you can possibly do is, and I actually lead this exercise all the time. Let’s let’s put your mission on a whiteboard. But let’s narrow it down to about eight words or less if we can. Let’s get rid of all the fluffy stuff. It’s all great. I love the fluff, but let’s just get it to eight words or less.

Gavin Adams — What are we really trying to do? Now let’s list everything that we are doing, and evaluated against that mission. The problem is that what we end up finding is lots of things that met a moment, met a need, met a small need, maybe even a big need, but it was a need that isn’t as necessary anymore. And we’re doing a lot of things that are barely moving the mission forward. Meanwhile there’s all of these other things that we we actually probably know would be better if we remodeled, you know, the house. But there are so many things we’d have to unearth and get rid of to remodel the house. The pain of that is is very challenging.

Gavin Adams — But what I would ask these pastors, and I do ask these pastors, but I would ask us today is, are we more concerned with the mission? Or the ministry model? Like what are we really married to?

Gavin Adams — Are we, we have this conversation with staff all the time, right? When you have to make a hard staff call. We love people. and want to lead people really well and and and lead you with integrity, but you are called to be loyal to the mission. Not a person. And so if a person is an obstacle between the community and the mission, we’ve got to resolve that obstacle.

Gavin Adams — Same thing with these ministries and programs and events, right? Too too often what we see is churches, we’ll just basically take last year’s calendar, move it to this year, adjust the dates so the weekends work again. And now we add a couple more things to it and we call it a plan, right?

Rich Birch — Right.

Gavin Adams — Well, that is so hard because we aren’t evaluating against the right criteria. And the benchmark criteria is the mission. So everything we do has to move the mission forward. And if it doesn’t, we really should think about why we’re doing it.

Rich Birch — Yeah, and the church leaders that I respect, you see this all the time. They’re like they’re so focused in on the mission in a good way and are trying to figure out, okay, how do we you know how do we how do we do this? How do we stay focused? How do we say no to things that we shouldn’t be saying yes to and, and, and so on and so forth.

Rich Birch — But let’s assume again that like I’m I get that I understand those pieces I still feel like okay we’ve accumulated all this stuff and I’m I’m not sure what even process, like, where do I start? Where’s the kind of right way to kind of roll this thing out? Kind of the the cutting back and focusing conversation. What would be some initial steps we should be taking around this?

Gavin Adams — Yeah. One, and this will sound self-serving, but I do not mean this in any way for me. I think it’s really important to bring fresh eyes into this conversation.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Gavin Adams — It’s also really challenging. And it, again, there are lots of people who are fantastic at this. And so find and you could even be somebody in your church who ah works in consulting or works in some sort of place that’s very strategic thinking, a leader like that.

Gavin Adams — But you know Rich, you know this, it’s really hard to participate and facilitate at the same time. And you know, as a lead pastor or an XP or someone in that space, we need your full attention on the thinking, not the facilitation. So I would bring somebody in to help with this.

Gavin Adams — And what I would, as far as a process goes, and it doesn’t have to be complicated.

Gavin Adams — I mentioned earlier, you know we we write the mission on the board and we try to figure out what are we actually trying to do. But we have to become very open-handed with everything we are doing and we have to ask some really, really hard questions. Who are we doing this for? What next steps is this creating?

Gavin Adams — If we think about discipleship ah pathways as a spiritual journey, that’s all it is. It’s a series of steps. Have we designed a pipeline or a pathway, whatever you want to call it, that is leading people who are far from God, closer to God with every interaction that they have with us. And do we have clear steps?

Gavin Adams — And some of them it could be events or programs. It could be all good things, right? But they are strategically aligned to create incremental steps. I like to think of it like a moving sidewalk. If you were to step onto our church’s moving sidewalk, will you automatically, almost easy, obvious, logical kind of steps, be moving in the direction of spiritual growth?

Gavin Adams — Because you’re in the pipeline now, you’re on the sidewalk. Now, but to create that means that we have to probably get rid of a lot of things maybe, or some things, maybe not a lot, but some things that are good, but aren’t strategic in that pipeline on that sidewalk.

Gavin Adams — I live in Atlanta. I say this, you know, as a joke, but you know, if I want to go to Disney world in Orlando from Atlanta, I could go through Arkansas. But that doesn’t really make a lot of sense, right? Churches have a lot of things like that on their pipeline on their you know kind of discipleship pathway where It’s good stuff, you know. Arkansas is a fun place possibly, but it doesn’t really align with our pathway and it creates confusion and complication for people who are trying to take steps.

Gavin Adams — And so I would just, you know, again, this this is a full day process, right? Write the mission up there. Write down all the things you’re doing. Ask some hard questions. And is it working? Because, you know is it working against the mission? Is it moving the mission forward? And you have to ask that for everything that you are doing. And then in a way, lay it out like a pipeline or a pathway and place all of these things that you’re doing on your calendar—the programs, the events, the gatherings, the mentor thing, the groups thing, all the things, generosity and and and give and and recruiting and volunteers—everything that you do.

Gavin Adams — Lay it out and look at it. And see if it’s actually a path. Or is it a giant buffet of stuff? And how do you reduce this thing down so that it looks a little bit more like a moving sidewalk than just a massive, you know, ah you know interstate with 13 lanes all heading maybe in ah in the same direction. But imagine being a person trying to drive on that. You don’t know where to go. I want to get you on a sidewalk that just takes you incrementally from where you are to the next right step for you.

Rich Birch — Yeah that’s good. And you know ah you and I have been in this long enough. I remember a time when churches actually would talk about their ministries in menu language.

Gavin Adams — Absolutely.

Rich Birch — They would say, we have 110 different ministries. And they would kind of brag about that.

Gavin Adams — Yeah.

Rich Birch — That would be like we’ve got like this whole big thing and you know and then over time, we realized, no, that just doesn’t really work. And it’s very hard to you know get momentum on that. And we’ve got more and more focused. And I think something happened around the pandemic, particularly, and how we…

Gavin Adams — Lots of things happened around the pandemic, right? Yeah.

Rich Birch — yeah, exactly. But particularly on this front around our keeping people focused and keeping them moving in the right direction. How how have you seen this change, this conversation change ah in the last, say, decade or five, six years, that kind of thing?

Gavin Adams — Yeah. Well, crisis illuminates and accelerates, right? So I think that and the pandemic was certainly a crisis. I think it illuminated a lot of things that we were doing well and then a lot of things that we probably weren’t doing well.

Gavin Adams — It also accelerated trends that were already beginning to happen. And so even you know in our church, watching trends that were beginning to pop up slowly in 2018 and ’19, you know, took 10 years went 10 years faster immediately you know in 2020. And I had the you know honor, privilege of leading through all that at the church. I was a lead pastor during all that, which was a nightmare, but I’m grateful I got to experience it and and learn from it.

Gavin Adams — And I learned some hard things. I think the number one thing that I learned that it really caused me to pause was how many people missed Church during this time and didn’t feel like they actually missed anything.

Gavin Adams — You know, I think a lot of people were going to church before the pandemic, and I don’t think I was doing a great job of creating something dynamically spiritually moving—and I don’t mean that like it has to be this grandiose you know you know thing—but that we were so probably unfortunately focused on butts in seats, inviting people to see the thing, that discipleship wasn’t as in the forefront as it should have been. So therefore we were accidentally leveraging consumerism to get people to church. But then in doing so, reinforcing consumerism in church. And so now people are consuming church. They went for six months, in my case, 11 months without consuming it in person, and realized they didn’t need to consume it.

Gavin Adams — Because their life didn’t…and in fact, what’s so hard to to acknowledge is how many people that would say their life didn’t get worse because they weren’t going to church anymore. Some of them would even tell you if they wanted to be honest, and some have with me, their life got better.

Rich Birch — Right.

Gavin Adams — They were home more. They had more time with their family. They were less busy. They were whatever. And I and I just remember thinking. Wow, like we really thought we had we were doing something great. A lot of people. And aAll of those people stopped going. And very few felt like, at least, I’ll say very few, at least this I’m probably being more pessimistic because it felt so hard, but you know, how many people missed going to church and didn’t really miss it.

Gavin Adams — And so therefore they didn’t really come back because they didn’t feel like they needed it. They realized not going wasn’t costing them anything. And that’s on me as a leader, right? That’s not their fault. That’s my fault for creating a church or allowing that to be the case. And that was really hard. That was a a real hard real realization for us.

Rich Birch — Yeah, and bringing that back to the alignment and kind of, you know, the accumulation that we have as a church what I’m assuming then, what and I’ve seen this in so many churches, we realized, oh, there’s a bunch of stuff we’re doing that that isn’t actually pushing the mission forward. It just kind of and then we took a break and it was like, oh my goodness, maybe we don’t need to do these things. Maybe you know turns out nobody’s actually interested in that. Or we’re giving way more energy to that and people are more distracted than they’ve ever been been before. And so we’ve got to be more focused because we can’t, we we’ve got to be super clear on when we move people through.

Rich Birch — When you talk about, you know your church needs to move people in one direction you have kind of this one point we’re trying to move people towards one thing. Can you unpack that a little bit more what’s that actually look like in a church?

Gavin Adams — Yeah, yeah, and this is gonna sound way too simplistic. But when when we talk about this with with pastors and churches, one of my favorite words for this is centricity. And it’s a business term. But we you know in the in the In the business community, they talk about being customer-centric or business-centric.

Gavin Adams — Customer-centricity means that we make every decision in light of our customer and really a purchase decision for a customer, right? So why does Target carry a certain you know kind of product? Well, because the customer will buy it. It’s customer-centric thinking.

Gavin Adams — Churches have notoriously church-centric in thinking, not person-centric in thinking. And so and here’s the part that gets real too simple, but I do think it it it makes sense. If you think about people in your community right now. We could plot everybody spiritually on a number line. Again, too simplistic, but it makes sense. If negative 10 is yeah Satan and plus 10 is Jesus, right? Everybody in your world is somewhere, everybody in the world, everybody in your community is somewhere between that, right?

Gavin Adams —And this is just pretend zero is some point of conversion, right? Put your faith in Christ we’re all somewhere between that everybody wherever eyeball to eyeball is somewhere between that. So when i when I think about, you know, the the place we’re trying to move people. We are trying to point them towards plus 10 and help them take incremental steps in that direction. This is Paul what he would call the renewing of the mind, right. And renewing, present tense, it’s never fully done. We never get to 10; nobody’s a 10.

Gavin Adams — Now, we have some people who think they’re 10s, and that’s dangerous. But interacting with people who are wherever they are, meeting them where they are, but helping them move in the direction of plus 10. That’s really what discipleship is. That’s all it is. We go to the negative side of the number line, as far back as we can reach. If a person’s a negative three and we can help them move to negative 2.9, that’s a huge win. If we as a church can help them move from you know negative three to negative two to zero, what an incredible thing.

Gavin Adams — And then move to one, move to three, move to seven. Like that’s what a a true pathway should look like. In fact, when you asked me earlier what does it look like to do this in process, really is putting that number line, this is another part of it, but you would think about everything that you’re doing as a church. Put it on the number line. Who is it serving on that number line?

Rich Birch — That’s good. Yeah.

Gavin Adams — Is it serving negative threes, negative eights? You know, probably not negative eights. It’s hard to go that far back. Plus eights. If you list everything, most churches are going to have a huge pile of things in this zero to three range and not a lot before it, and very little after three.

Rich Birch — That’s true.

Gavin Adams — Which is why, by the way, when you hear someone say, we just don’t feel like we’re being fed, this is the problem. Like this is exactly what’s happening. They got to they got to plus three. They don’t know how to get to plus four. Your church doesn’t know how to move people past three. And so therefore, they think another church will be better at this.

Rich Birch — Right.

Gavin Adams — So they go somewhere else that maybe feels deeper. They use Greek words more or whatever it may be. You know, and deeper doesn’t mean more confusing, but that’s typically what we associate it to.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s what they mean. Yes

Gavin Adams — But then after another couple of years, they still feel the same way. Now they’re looking for another church. Because that church also didn’t have a really good plan to move people past a three on the number line. Does that make sense, Rich?

Rich Birch — Yeah, it makes total sense. Okay, so you’ve got a book coming out or it’s come out around these areas.

Gavin Adams — Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Rich Birch — Talk to me about this. How does it connect to this conversation? How do we, how do we, you know, get kind of knit these two together?

Gavin Adams — Yeah, yeah. Yeah, for sure. Well, it’s called a Remodel, but it’s really five questions that help you as a church understand how to rethink, rebuild, or before you build anything, ask the five questions to ensure we’re getting it right.

Gavin Adams — In fact, we call it the five rights. This is something I developed probably 10 years ago initially and began working through it and really have helped, I don’t want to say perfect it, but have really made a framework out of this now, having worked with churches around the world and seeing it work in so many different kinds of contexts.

Gavin Adams — So the five rights is based on the five rights. The five rights are: we want to make sure the right person gets the right message at the right time and the right way that leads to the right next step. Those are the five rights. And so what I said earlier that this is really a structural design conversation where you can kind of see even in those five rights, what we’re doing is starting with the person. Let’s decide who we are building this program for, this event for…

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Gavin Adams — …this sermon for, whatever it may be. How do we ensure that we design a message? And by the way, if you’re a business person or think this way, this is just segmentation. That’s all this is, right? So how do we design the right message for that person so that we’re speaking to them where they are with words that make sense to them, right?

Gavin Adams — We don’t talk to a person who’s a non-believer about progressive sanctification. That doesn’t make sense, right? But we will do that later on. So we talk to them where they’re at with verbiage and language and a message that meets them where they are. We make sure that the timing is right. We we can’t offer you know an opportunity for somebody who isn’t ready for it. But when they are ready, we want to make sure that we are ready for them.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Gavin Adams — So again, this is them-centric, not us-centric. We don’t launch groups in August only because that works for me and our church, right?

Rich Birch — Right. That’s good.

Gavin Adams — We you know we already we already have some of that we can’t undo, you know church service times and so forth. But by the way, this is why we don’t see churches you know with massive Tuesday night services. Why? Or Tuesday morning. Most of us were at work. We choose Sunday morning because it’s the optimal time. We know that for people, right? So the timing matters.

Gavin Adams — The way matters, you know? People who are not believers versus 40-year deep in their faith believers are going to take steps in different ways. And so is it one-on-one mentoring steps? Is it one-to-few in a small group setting? Is it ah one-to-many in a service setting? I mean, there are so many different ways that we can execute ministry. And again, all of those four are building to number five, which is the right next step. This is what discipleship is all about. Not…Progress is important. Pace is not. It can go very slow at times, and that’s okay.

Gavin Adams — Negative 2.8 to two point negative 2.7 can be very slow, but that’s okay. They’re making progress towards the 10. And so when we think about those five rights, it gives us five questions that we can evaluate everything we’re currently doing and anything we want to start doing. So we ask the question, who is this really for, right? What message do they need to hear? What timing is going to be best for us to ask this or talk about this with people, ah depending on who they are?

Gavin Adams — What way is typically going to be best for these people depending again on who they are. And then what is the right next step for this category of person. Those five rights…

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Gavin Adams — …ensure that we do the right things for the right people.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great. That all that makes a lot of sense. I can understand that’s a really clear framework. I think that’s fantastic. Just define or tease out a little bit the difference between the right way and the right next step.

Gavin Adams — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Those kind of at the end of the five, how does where does where’s the bridge between those two?

Gavin Adams — Yeah, so when we think about um the right next step, that’s the easier one to think through first. The right next step is movement towards Jesus, right? A Christ-like life.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Gavin Adams — So that’s our plus 10, moving closer to that.

Gavin Adams — So we know that in everything that we are offering, we do not want people walking away with more information. We want them to have application, which means they are doing something, taking a step.

Gavin Adams — So when we think about steps in our church, we want to think about whether they are steps we are offering or steps that a person can take on their own. You know, reading the Bible more consistently, praying, those are things that they could do, of course, in the church, but they all also can do on their own. Serving in the community, being generous, all of those things can be done in the church or outside of the church. But those are all steps.

Gavin Adams — To grow in anything is probably taking a step. So when we think about what step we are hoping to ask a person to take. Depending on, and I’ll go quickly back to the number line, you know, a person who is a negative three to a zero, we call those people seekers. Zero to three is a student because they’re learning. Three to about seven, we call those people shapers because they are actively shaping their life now after their their savior. And then, you know, again, nobody makes it to 10, but seven to 10, we call those people stewards. They are stewarding their life for the kingdom at this point, right?

Gavin Adams — Each of those different categories of people are going to probably function, again—and I don’t mean every single person—there are outliers…

Rich Birch — No, I get that. Yeah.

Gavin Adams — …but categorically, each of these categories are going to function a little bit better in certain types of ways. So think about we want you to begin serving. However, a non-believer serving in a large group setting in the community is probably a better way for them than coming alongside in a small group to do you know you know teaching high school students about Jesus that’s you First of all, you would never let a non-believer do that. But that would be a very intimidating way.

Rich Birch — Sure.

Gavin Adams — And they wouldn’t take that step. Because the way doesn’t match where they are. So when we think about how we offer things, can I give you an example like in volunteering since we’re just talking about that, Rich?

Rich Birch — Sure. Yeah, absolutely.

Gavin Adams — You know, if you’ve got a person who’s you know somewhere in that seeker category, and but you want to get them into a you know serving. It’s a part of spiritual growth. And they begin to learn a little bit more about themselves and about you know faith. So what what can you do? Well, maybe there’s a food drive your church is doing. And it’s a one-day opportunity, low commitment. They get a fun t-shirt from it and they get breakfast, but they’re not doing anything spiritually, but they are rubbing shoulders with people and beginning to engage in the life and mission of a local church, even though they’re not a believer yet.

Gavin Adams — So that is a perfect way, a one-off opportunity for someone who is seeking and that category of seeking they’re not there yet not a believer yet to take a step that is easy for them to take, that can help move them down a bit of a discipleship pathway, right? Well, the next thing a person could do is maybe serving and this is just basic pipeline work but maybe they serve every other week in a guest services or hospitality space, or once a month in something like that, or maybe in production.

Gavin Adams — It’s not a spiritual support space, leadership space. They are not being asked to be there every week. It’s a low commitment. They can still actually attend the service while they’re serving. So we’re not asking them to serve and attend, right?

Gavin Adams — And so it’s a lower it’s a higher commitment than the food drive, but it’s still a lower commitment role. That’s perfect for somebody who’s kind of transitioning into maybe becoming a student. Right? Well, now we can take a person and say, well, what if the next way for you is to do an every week thing? That’s a different kind of way. Then you become a coach or a captain over leaders.

Rich Birch — Oh, I see. That’s good.

Gavin Adams — Then you become a staff member, right?

Gavin Adams — So when you think about the pipeline of how it moves, it’s all moving in a volunteer perspective from virtually no commitment to a very high commitment.

Rich Birch — That’s cool.

Gavin Adams — That’s the different ways that we would use.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that makes that makes total sense. One other on the five rights, looking back to the right person, and you named this, the this idea of segmentation, who are we trying to reach?

Gavin Adams — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Who, you know when, you know, we define that. Is that the kind of thing you’re thinking about?

Gavin Adams — Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Rich Birch — Like trying to think through clearly who are who’s the person that we’re trying to design this thing for?

Gavin Adams — Yeah. Exactly. The problem is a lot of times because we’re church-centric, not people or community-centric, we do tend to design backwards. We we start with what we are what we want to do, and then we try to figure out who it’s for.

Rich Birch — Sure.

Gavin Adams — What I’m trying to suggest is we start with who are we trying to reach. And then let’s build something for them. And what we find is that when you build something for everyone, you kind of end up building something for no one.

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s true.

Gavin Adams — So, if we want to build something to help us reach a non-believer, what should we build? How should we talk about it? How do we market it? How do we advertise it? How do we speak to that category of person who might be in our rooms on a Sunday morning service to inspire them to take a step? I’ll give you a great example.

Gavin Adams — You know. lots of churches do things like Alpha or Starting Point. How do you talk about that, right, really is going to make a difference. How you offer that experience is going to make a difference, the timing of it. Again, whether it’s Sunday morning, Sunday afternoon, Wednesday at nights, whatever it may be, but also even the timing of the year makes a lot of a difference. You know, so coming out of in January, coming out of Easter, those are great timings for things like that.

Gavin Adams — The way – a small group of people sitting around who all are kind of curious and have some questions is a safe way for someone to take that step. So we always start with the person and design from there.

Rich Birch — That’s good. Yeah that’s good. That’s great. So talk to us about the book. How does this fit into helping churches, you know, if i’m a I’m a church leader that’s sitting in, to me, it strikes me as the kind of thing like, hey, this could be a good opening conversation for us to wrestle through these questions. But how can you see this fitting into the kind of our leadership discussions at our church?

Gavin Adams — Yeah, great question. So that’s why actually why I wrote the book. I had been I’ve worked on this for about a decade and and implemented it in my church, and now I’ve implemented it in so many other churches now. And what what I have found is that these questions, everybody wants to be effective in their mission. Everybody wants to not waste their time.

Gavin Adams — We don’t want to just be busy for the sake of being busy. I mean, we all hate that. And so how do we become the most effective ah church? How how do we organize in a way that ensures that our mission is the most important mission? We treat it like that. So we all believe that, but the gap between knowing that’s true and then being able to do it, that’s the hard thing.

Gavin Adams — And and Rich, you know this as well as anyone. This industry that we are in in church is such a cyclical every seven days here comes this thing and it feels like every four days.

Rich Birch — Yeah. So true. Yes.

Gavin Adams — And so to pause and work on it is so challenging. And so the book gives you a very step-by-step guide. It’s a framework to help you really to have kind of have me, I guess, help you through the questions and the process of evaluating what you’re currently doing, deciding what needs to be different, and then rebuilding a model that works for where you are today. It’s the simplest way that you could do it.

Gavin Adams — Because as we all know, if you just say one day to your lead team or your elder board, I think we’re going to change our model. That’s a challenging thing to say. How are you going to go about doing it? So the book is written to help walk you through the process of evaluating where you are and then rebuilding something that works better for your mission in the world today.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great. And we’re going to put a link in the show notes for people to get a sample of this. I think it’s that’s super kind and generous of you to put that. We’ll put that link in there if people want to pick up and get a chance to read a little bit of it before they jump in.

Rich Birch — The name of it is RE:MODEL – Five Questions That Reshape How You See and Build Your Church. Where can people get this if they’re buying books? I’m assuming Amazon. Are there other places we want to send them?

Gavin Adams — Yeah. Amazon’s the best. Yeah. Amazon’s the best place to get it. And then you can go to gavinadams.com and I’ve got information there and links that you can grab all the the stuff there too.

Rich Birch — Yeah, this is super helpful. As we wrap up, any final words as we leave people with on this this topic as we close today’s conversation?

Gavin Adams — Yeah, well, yeah, and not necessarily specifically for this topic as much as I am so grateful for the number of of men and women that are dedicating their lives to the kingdom through the local church because it is, I think I can say this, having led one for 13 years, it’s the hardest job I have ever seen. And it comes with more weight, more spiritual expectation, more pain, more tragedy, challenges. I mean, who else is working on a P&L and also planning a funeral on the same day?

Rich Birch — Right. Yes.

Gavin Adams — It’s just such a hard job. And so it’s easy to be discouraged and it’s easy. um to not to not feel certain that you’re getting it right. And I love the fact that if God’s going to lean in the direction of any leader, it’s going to be the the direction of a pastor and helping us get it right. And so just keep doing the hard work and keep pressing forward and you know be okay with making it 1% better every day. That’s kind of the goal.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great. Thanks so much, Gavin. Really appreciate being here. Thank you for all the work you do to help so many church leaders. Again, that’s gavinadams.com. You should swing by there, check out him, Instagram, all those places, and pick up a copy of the book. I really appreciate you being on today. Thanks for being here.

Gavin Adams — Yeah, thanks. I appreciate you.