CEP SEASON TWO EP: 24 - WITH GUEST ANTHONY CHRISTOPHER
By Dave Mckeown and Nathan Benger
The Church Explained podcast is a conversation to help grow your leadership, develop your team and build your church. Your hosts will be Dave Mckeown and Nathan Benger. We talk about all things leadership with key team players from IKON Church and other guests during each show.
Welcome to Season 2, Episode: 24 of the Church Explained Podcast with guest Anthony Christopher
A Short bio
Anthony Christopher is the messaging pastor at Reverb Church in Saint Augustine, Florida. He oversees all things worship, production, digital and communications across the church. He also serves on the executive leadership team, helping drive vision and healthy decisions for the wider church.
In our conversation with Anthony, he shares some fantastic insights from his second chair role. In addition, he offers some brilliant ways in which we can serve those who lead us better.
SHOW NOTES
FULL TRANSCRIPT
CREATED BY AI - SO NOT 100% accurate.
David Mckeown 0:00
Hey, welcome to the church explained podcast a conversation to grow your leadership and build your Church today. We've got a fantastic guest joining with us. We've got a guy called Anthony Christopher the hallway from Florida. So welcome, Anthony to the show today.
Nathan Benger 0:24
My name is Nathan. And with Dave, I'm a host on the church explained podcast. And as you can tell, this is like raw. We are not released here. But it's great. It's great to have Anthony Christopher with us. Anthony is the messaging Pastor reverb Church in St. Augustine, Florida, overseeing all things worship production, digital and communications across the Church. So he's a busy guy. He also serves on the executive leadership team. They're helping drive vision and decisions for the wider Church. But Anthony, apart from that, why don't you just tell us a little bit about your faith story, and entering into men's ministry all around.
Anthony Christopher 1:07
So, um, you know, I'm sure lengthen, which is a tiny island, just beneath India, no one really knows about it, but it's a gorgeous place to go. My parents moved from there in 1988 moved England. My mom actually was in Norway, my dad moved to England. They got married. I was born in 91, in smaller place for two teams in South London. So I'm born and raised London, I love it. It's the best seat in the whole wide world, I would say. And my Mum Mum was already a Christian, my dad became a believer when it was in 1990 95. And the, the kind of churches I grew up in are Tamil speaking. So there's a language interlined before Tamil, that's the language that I speak. So all the churches I went to with Tamil speaking churches, I didn't know any Hillsong I didn't know anything. I thought in check, it was all like Tamil worship music. And that's what I grew up in. So God saved when I was 13 years old. My sisters were born 13 weeks prematurely. I was like, man, if there's a God that can save them, then I'm gonna put my faith in Him. And, you know, what has a funny way of doing life with me, and they were doing great. And I was like, I'm gonna put my trust in God, because I know that this is a miracle. So gave my life to Christ when I was 13 years old. And I would argue that I probably only really to my fate series, when I turned 19 and went to university, went to University Park, a chair, studied biomedical science. Which, you know, I didn't want to do I wanted to do live sound production. But my mum and dad were like, no, no, let's do a job that is going to pay you well. They put me into, because I wasn't clever enough to be a doctor. That's the truth. So they were like, what's a step down from that? And if you're watching online, and you're you're not a scientist, no shots fired at you. Hey, sorry, I did that. And I worked at Public Health England for a year, which you know, if you're in England right now, you should know all about that. So did a year with them, and went back to university to finish up my final year. And I was actually approached by a local Church Pastor, through my connections at the Christian Union that I was leading at the time. And out of the blue, he said, Hey, man, look, where we just planted a Church is only a year old. We're looking for our first hire, would you be interested? And the truth is, I didn't want to go back and do lab work. And so to me, that's boring. So I was like, Yeah, sure, I'll do it. But in my culture, you gotta go to your parents and say, Hey, I'm thinking of doing this. What are your thoughts? And they were both like, No, we don't want you to do that. We want you to pursue a career, you want to buy a house and all that stuff. And long story short, I said, No. I said, No, I'm not going to take a job. I'm going to respect my parents. And they're doing. The guy asked me again. And I was like, Look, I really want to do this to my parents. And this time, you know, I was like, the Bible says, If you disagree with you, disagree with someone, you bring someone in with you to kind of talk this through did that. And they all agreed. They said, Don't do it. So I said, Okay, no, but the thing my uncle said he was the other person that came was like, Look, if this is supposed to be, it's going to happen. And you'll get asked again, and the Pastor, he's not the kind of guy who, you know, begs, and I'm grateful for that. Because I knew it was God when he asked me the third time. And this time, I didn't go to my parents. I said, yeah, we'll do it. And then I went and told the parents. So that's how I go into my first step of ministry. And the biggest joke is, I took over the kids ministry had no idea what I'm doing, because remember, I've never been an English Church before. I've never done in any form of leadership in one of those contemporary churches, I had no idea what I was doing. So did work through pretty much any role you could think of except for women's minutes. fingers. So yeah, long story short, that's how I got into my first management role.
David Mckeown 5:11
Wonderful. Hey, it's great to hear some of your story there. Come on, tell us what do you do for fun? We just want some fun in here, as well. So tell us, what do you do for fun?
Anthony Christopher 5:19
Honestly, I love my wife. My wife's name is Lindsay. And you know, we got three kids. So fun to me, I think you can love your kids. But know that sometimes it's just not fun with it. So I love them so much that I want to have fun with my wife instead. So every Friday, my mother in law graciously takes cares, because she takes care of all the kids and we get to go out for the whole day. And what we do is we find restaurants or places we've never eaten before. And we just go after it. So the other day, we went to a Rayleigh restaurant. And it was incredible. So that's what we do is love the places and getting good coffee. She's all about the pictures. So anything that she can attend, where she can take a picture, or more than I'm trained, well trained in public, I take pictures. Yeah.
Nathan Benger 6:08
You were a US photographer.
Anthony Christopher 6:11
It's three, four years of training. I'm still not there yet. But what I've learned is, and this is great advice for your single young man. The rule is take as many shots as possible. And if you think it's enough, it's not enough. Just keep going until you stop by your wife or your girlfriend. So I've learned that all.
David Mckeown 6:31
Yeah. So Anthony, you've you moved to Florida. Tell us a wee bit about that. I mean, obviously, you got into ministry, you were serving in a Church here in the UK, you moved to Florida, tell us a little bit about that, and the Church there in Florida. And then we're gonna get in and just chat a little bit around your role in a moment or two. But we're just like to hear a bit more about I'll say people are listening. And they they've heard you're in Florida, listen, your accent to do not add up. Because you've got to your accent is more British than mine is. So come on, share with us. What happened there? What's the journey? Yeah,
Anthony Christopher 7:11
it's kind of wild. So in 2019, so I'd been working for the Church that was talking about it was in St. Albans, worked for them for about four years. And then you know, Lindsey, and I, we, we decided it was time to move on. And we will start preparations to move to the US from that point onwards. And along the way, you know, 2020 comes along, you know, and everyone knows about 2020. And it's honestly a miracle story. And, again, I'll keep it super short, but on I think March, one of the Mondays in March, President Trump out here at the time said, Hey, we're going to shut down the borders. If you're a US citizen, if you need to get back home, because we're going to, we're not going to let anyone else in. So I'm at the embassy at this point. And I've just got the approval for my visa and it takes like 14 working days to get your visa. So my oh my gosh, if I'm not, I don't get out this week, we're what we're doing. And this is how you know God is in the mood. Tuesday morning, we get a letter of approval in the mail saying, Hey, we're processing a visa and be 14 working days. Wednesday morning in the mailbox is my visa. And then Friday, we had an I noticed to landlord, Saturday, we get on a plane out. And I'm saying that because before all of this, the Church out here's a reverb the one that I work for. Now, they had reached out to me because my my in laws go to this Church, they knew about my background and that I work for a judge. They are the blue contacted me and said, Hey, if you are going to move out to Florida, would you consider working for us? And I was kind of like, he's there's like you don't really know me. You've only met me like once or twice as if you wanted to work with me. So again, this is like I keep saying this is how I knew it was God that moved me from the UK to America because honestly, I didn't apply for a Church job. I was already in a more corporate role that I could do anywhere in the world. And I was kind of content with that. And so I wasn't really in a rush to get back into ministry. But just like how I was approached to work for the first Church. For some reason, God has a really funny sense of humour that he wants to find me and my most comfortable and be like, actually, it's enough put that down. Let's let's move to American DNA ministry again. So that's how I found myself. Riva then when I joined, I started taking over the digital side of things because obviously in 2020, everything is digital. So I was very hands on during the youtube platform. That was the one which I think at the time and I'm not saying this to brag, but I'm just saying how, how if you put enough focus on something we can grow something we had, I think 300 subscribers on youtube in March 2020. We just passed 1000 people, not just about a week because that was heavy focus and drive into and obviously 2020 2021 early, really helped with people being online. But that's what that was my first big project when I moved out.
David Mckeown 10:14
And that sounds pretty, pretty exciting stuff and an exciting move the hallway from Rainy England to sunny Florida. I'm sure you guys are happy with what we were chatting on today a little bit about your role. I'll say your called your title, there is around the message in Pastor Pastor. And you can say a little bit about that name in a moment. But I I know, when we chatted, we talked about this idea of the fact that you love serving in the role you're in your love being almost in that second show, you're not necessarily looking to go to a senior role or a senior leader. And I just wonder if you had maybe speak into that, because there's probably a lot of leaders listening, thinking, Well, I'm in my role. And actually, sometimes people are thinking I need to get to the next level on next level. But maybe it's about being contented in the role you're in. So I wonder if you could just speak into that. Tell us a little bit about your role. And, and what this means to you about sort of being in a sec.
Anthony Christopher 11:16
I think, regardless of the role that you're in, you should be contented in whatever position you're in, especially when it comes to ministry. I'm called to ministry, I'm not called to be a youth Pastor. Because that makes sense. Like, the role that I play for the department that I serve in is irrelevant. I'm called to ministry. I'm called to building the Church. So you know, jokes aside, if they put me over women's ministry, I guess I'm doing women's ministry, I wouldn't be great at it. You know, it's irrelevant. I'm, I'm literally here at my pastor's pleasure. And whatever he or she wants me to do, I'm going to execute that role. And so when, the way I linked that to the second chair, or? Yeah, the number two position, which is, you know, not necessarily the lead Pastor, but serving on a exec team, I find joy in that, because I can go and ask my process, Hey, what are you struggling with? What are your pain points? What would you like me to solve? And then I can go fix that. First and foremost, I think that's leadership, one on one, your job is to solve problems. Everyone in leadership should be able to do that. I think that's a prerequisite of being a leader. But I also think that it is a gift. Like, I think I'm applying my trumpet, I think I'm good at seeking out problems and solving them. I get a kick out of it. And I think I think back to my first job that I worked for, and the leader of our workforce, he was really good at trusting me with solving problems. You know, I was I had zero experience in all aspects of Church that he would like I'm thinking about right now. You know, how like churches can sponsor people from abroad to work with them. He had me in charge of the whole application process. And I was only what 24 at the at the time, and looking back, because now I'm in a Church where we use lawyers for that kind of stuff. We have me do the whole process. So you might think of that as oh my gosh, that doesn't sound wise. I look at that thing. What an empowering leader who trusted me to fix a problem that he was facing. And when he told me, he wanted me to do that, I just said, yeah, how hard can it be? And it was petrifying. But I've learned so much because of it. And I know that I'm the man I am because of those opportunities. So being in the second seat for me is very freeing. I don't have the weight of the whole Church on me. I don't. And frankly speaking, my parents were pastors of the Church that I was in. I don't I don't, I don't see that for me. You know, and I think that's okay. I don't feel like I need to preach every week. But I'm content with not preaching at all. But if I'm asked to, you better believe I'm going to do it to the best of my ability and serve my class as well. So yeah, I hope that helps someone because I know there are people that sometimes see it as is a big ambition is good, like we should all strive or not strive, we should all want to progress, right. We should all want to climb the social ladder, but not at the cost of other people and not at the cost of your true like calling which say your calling is the ministry. Not I don't think it's necessarily to a role. I think you call that leadership, ultimately, and that's good enough. So yeah, it's very freeing for me, I love it. And I get a kick out of it. So that's why I enjoy being in the position that I'm in.
Nathan Benger 14:48
It's great. It's great. Yeah, it's great thinking, Antony. I wonder if you just kind of just to jump off the back of that a little bit. You mentioned and So you wrote down in some of the notes that we have here, that you enjoy fixing the things that bother my pastors, and you're good at spotting them. I wonder if you could talk about how you spot those. And, you know, like the intentionality of spotting those problems for your pastors and and how you do,
Anthony Christopher 15:19
I'll answer that, but I want to switch it to go to you. Because I know for a fact you both serve in a similar position to what I do. So maybe we can all like bounce ideas around because I know it will help a lot of people. But me some of the verbal cues are I wish we could say if I hear my Pastor say, I wish we could do this, I will write that down. And I will research it. So I remember my Pastor was saying I wish we had a building. So I would go online and search as many buildings as possible, whether we could afford them or not, and contact estate agents and say, Hey, how much would it be for us to do this? And then I presented to my Pastor or two people that I knew the congregation that are really good at this stuff, and try and present solutions be like, I know you want to do this. And I know it may not be possible. But here, here are the things that maybe we need to do before that. If you're in a WhatsApp group with your new Pastor, or you see him comment in second group chat, if he says, so frustrating, or can you do this? Or I know we kept I know, I want to do this one day. Like if you see any of that language, take a note. What what are the things that you know, your Pastor is frustrated by and you can tell by facial expressions? On a Sunday, we will be observing your Pastor? What is he looking at? Is he looking at? Is he looking at a certain spot in the auditorium every single Sunday? If so, what is bothering him about that specific spot? Is it because the light is too bright in his face? And he's not willing to tell you because he's trying to be nice? Well, you can fix that. Is he frustrated? Or is she frustrated by the front row not being filled, solve that problem, get a bunch of your mates and sit on the front row. That's honestly, that's the number one thing that I've experienced date, of course, a lot of that front row and vocal so you can be the solution to that. Don't expect someone else to do that. You can do that. So those are the things I've observed. And I flip it to you guys. And I was like, what are the other cues that you've seen?
Nathan Benger 17:19
Go for it, Dave. Go for? Yeah.
David Mckeown 17:20
Yeah, I think what you said around that he's brilliant in the sense of looking for those verbal cues or looking for the body language. And I think that's something that we we would tend to do quite well at a concert, we're looking. We're looking for that stuff. But we're also asking the right questions, thinking about the questions we want to ask that will help as well sometimes move the burden from the senior leaders, not in a wrong sense, but help them carry that burden, or help them carry those issues rather than they're carrying it. But they feel like they're on their own. So I think one of one of the things I'm always looking out for is Hi, can we help to make their work easier, and the things that they're doing? So it's just noticing those things and ask the right questions in the right environments, as well as asking the questions that will help the team see the big picture. And not just not just the individual. So it's trying to see how people see the big the big issues, and how we solve these things. Yeah,
Anthony Christopher 18:22
when you said, like asking the right questions, I think one of the best questions that I would ask is, What can I take off your plate this week? So if you have a one to one, and this is not just for the senior leader, so like I have four team members that report to me, and they will ask me the same question, hey, what can we take off your plate? And I asked that to my outline, what can I take your plan? The cool thing is, we all want our churches to grow. I'm pretty sure that anyone listening to this podcast wants their Church to grow. And we can only grow, we share the load of work that needs to be done to do that. And I think the healthy churches, and I know that IKON for a fact is a healthy Church. They ask their senior leaders these questions. And that way the senior leader can focus on driving vision, meaning that will people pushing the vision forward pushing, planning more effectively preaching more effectively, they can only do that if they're not in the nitty gritty of all the things that you know, we can take. So if we want our churches to grow, we've got to be proactive in asking our leaders hey, what can we take off your plate? What can we distribute out to the rest of the team? And actually, that's also discipleship. bringing other people along the journey is the whole point because it's not just leadership. It's actually a biblical principle to bring people on the journey and do the work together. equipping the saints if you want to be more spiritual about it, that's our job to do. And the more people involved, there's more buy in so naturally, the church's work is more more buying means things get done. So I think it's a win win. Yeah.
Nathan Benger 19:56
No, I, I agree. And you said a word that was kind of going to be my thing of proactive, being proactive with it, you know, you can see, you know, you gave the example looking in the auditorium in the same spot, but you could just think, well, he's bothered by that. But you don't do anything about it. It's being proactive. You know, it's being proactive in asking the questions. It's just being proactive in doing that. And being willing to do it, I think is really important. So Anthony, you obviously you've, you know, you've entered into this new season, this new Church, what have been some of the biggest changes in the Church where you are now? And how have you navigated those changes with
Anthony Christopher 20:37
Yeah, so really exciting season in our Church, we just bought a brand new building, and I say Granny, it was an old building, we bought it in 2020. And it used to be an old golf, John Weldon, we stripped it all down and build it from the ground up. And it's been a big change. Because I, the crazy thing is, I'm 30 years old. Now, I've never been in a permanent building. For Church, I've always been set up tear down environment. So it's all I know. So when we were making the transition as a Church, we'd be portable. For 10 years, we've only existed for 10 years, was our 10th year of ministry. So the transition and the journey for the volunteer base for our staff, especially, has been very different. Everything changes, and obviously, you guys know this better than me, because you've done this multiple times. And I guess some of your locations are still portable, right, but you have some permanent location. So you guys know more than I do about this. On the other side of it. We're right in the middle of that. bringing people along the journey, you know, you hear statements like man, they've got enough volunteers now there and then you building Oh, my man until Jesus comes, there's never enough of it, there's always planning to do so that doesn't work. So even teaching volunteers that. And then I don't know if it's if you guys have felt the same in transition from portable to permanent. But for some reason, when there's when it becomes a permanent location, more people start coming to the Church, new people start coming to Church is interesting to me, I don't understand the science of helping that many new people in a short amount of time. Understand the culture of the Church. And equally those people that are joining team, helping them understand, hey, this is what it looks like for your team. That has been a challenge. Because you know, we've essentially doubled in size in the last, I would say six months. So we're you know, we're ramping everything up as quick as possible. We're trying to make everything as easy as possible onboarding as quick and as easy as possible. It's been a challenge. And one of the things that we've been doing in the round that I oversee in messaging, I tend to focus on one or two departments per year. So I've got four departments that I oversee. But the truth is, I'm not good enough for a leader to oversee, and be intentional on all four, and give all 100% of my thought and my energy and my drive. So I pick two per year, and say, Hey, I'm just gonna focus on these guys. So this year has been, you know, worship and production. So, one of the biggest things we change for the worship team is there's a whole three auditioning process, we literally took all of our teeth, I think we have about 45 team members for the worship team. And I said, every single one of you are gonna go through the audition process. And here's why. It's not okay for just myself and my worship director to be telling people, this is what the process is, as a Church, this is a lot of us now. So I need all 45 of you to go through it and be the evangelists for the worship team. So we just did that we elevate the standard or like, take, one of the things that we're going to be strong about as a ministry and as a worship team is we're going to be present, whether you're scheduled or not, we expect you to be in Church. So I know it's crazy. But our radical thought is that you should you should be in Church at least three to four times a week. And bear in mind, the norm in the US is once every four weeks. So we're challenging that and trying to drive them towards. And this is where discipleship. We're trying to help them understand, you know, Church is crucial to our Christian faith and to our walk, and therefore we want people to represent that. And so yeah, we've said, if you, we would love for you to be there three out of the four weeks and check it. Obviously, if they got holidays or vacations, that's different. But for the most part, we have an expectation that you lead from the front or you lead from the seats in the auditorium. Either way, you're on the team. So that's one of the biggest changes we made. I think two of the biggest principles that I've really been focusing on. One I've taken from one of my favourite books. There's a lot of swearing in it, so don't read it. And don't judge me like there's this book called Extreme Ownership by Jacko. wheeling is one of my, it's one of my favourite books of all time, I've read it maybe three or four times. And like I said, if you're
Anthony Christopher 25:07
not too many words in it, but the principle is that you own everything. So one of the things I got our messaging teams to do, we did our Christmas experiences, I got every single messaging team member on that day, to walk around from the carpark all the way to the Kids Spaces. through to the auditorium, they literally went around, picking up litter off the floor, and made sure every environment was perfect. And I sat them down at the end. And I said, this is what Extreme Ownership looks like. The auditorium is in your place of ownership, that's a part of what we own our whole experience. And the experience starts from, from the top of, we don't need that just the people who oversee the parking, see, if you're on platform, you're a host, if you're on production, your hosts, were welcoming people into the presence of Jesus. And we hope that by the end of it, they will live forever change. So we've been kind of harping on about the principle of Extreme Ownership. And the other one is Canada, ca n vor, which is me if I was the tip spiritualizing it will be racing through both go hand in hand. And so what I never want to happen is people be afraid to tell me something that they've seen that could be improved. I want them to be able to come up to me that I want them to call me out on things. I'm okay with that. Because I'm a man, I can make mistakes. And I do make mistakes. And I've told my team, that we're not candid with each other if we don't have grace and truth at the same time, we're not going to grow, we're not going to fix the things that are broken anything. And we're not going to be able to fix bad culture that may seep in as new people come in. And one thing that you'll notice is you know the Bible's it's a little it's a little little foxes that spoil the vine. Right? That's important. If someone were please, yes.
David Mckeown 27:01
Fantastic. So Nathan, where else can people find free resources, all that sort of stuff we'll give away.
Yeah, so I conduct Church forward slash open. There's all the free resources on there. And also, let me just encourage you. I know this has been a great episode and you'll definitely want to share this so please share this with people and if you could rate review, subscribe however you consuming the content. That really helps us but that's it for now on the church explained podcast we look forward to seeing you again very soon.
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