CEP SEASON THREE EP: 10 - WITH GUEST CARL NICHOLS

Mar 16

By Dave Mckeown and Nathan Benger

Welcome to Season 3, Episode: 10 of the Church Explained Podcast with guest Carl Nichols.

A SHORT BIO

I have been married to my wife Julie for 23 years. Pastor of Relevant Church just south of Atlanta, GA. It started in 2010 with five people; now, we have 3,000 regularly attending.

In part one of our conversations, Carl Nichols from Relevant Church shares six things he has learned in times of crisis that are helping many churches and leaders prepare before a crisis occurs.

We hope you enjoy it.

SHOW NOTES

Download Show Notes

FULL TRANSCRIPT

CREATED BY AI - SO NOT 100% accurate.

David Mckeown 0:00

Welcome to part one of our conversation with Carl Nichols from relevant territory. We think you're gonna really love this today. And so listen up, and let's see what we will learn together. Welcome to the church explained podcast a conversation degree or leadership on Build Your Church. We've got a brilliant podcast lined up for us today we've got a brilliant guest guy called Carl Nichols all the way from America. That's for us, really in the UK, Europe, maybe in America. It's not too far away, no pay, but great to have you here with his car. Thank

Carl Nichols 0:32

you so much, Dave, I appreciate you guys invited me. And it's amazing what we can do with technology these days. Yeah,

Nathan Benger 0:39

sounds amazing. Let's find out a little bit about you then this afternoon. Yeah, so we, as we always do, we get called to write a little bio. And it was a short bio compared to some of the other ones that we've had. So like, get ready, get ready. Carl has been married to his wife, Julie, for 23 years. He's Pastor of a relevant Church just south of Atlanta, which he started in 2010 with five people and now it's around 3000 People regularly who attend that call. As Dave said, it's so great to have you on the church explained podcast.

David Mckeown 1:14

Thank you so much. Wonderful. Yeah. So it's great that we're gonna find out a little bit more about you, Carla, as we go through. And obviously we'll pick up on some of the themes I guess, you've been working through in your life and in your Church. We want to talk about leadership and crisis and how are we dealing with that. So we'll pick that up as we go through as well. But before we get there, come on, tell us a little bit about your, your faith story or your ministry story. We'd love to find it a little bit about that as we kick off.

Carl Nichols 1:43

Absolutely. So I actually grew up in a small Methodist Church and my grandmother, my parents didn't go to Church. And I went to Church with her SOS, about 11 years old and slept under the Pew every Sunday, went to Sunday school, went to Vacation Bible School, learn some of the stories of the Bible, but had really no no understanding of application to my wife and what it would have required me and then 11 years old, I had an encounter with Jesus. And when my mom went back to a Church that she had been a part of when she was younger, my family didn't really have a strong faith at all. And so we went back to that Church, just for a Bible service, believe it or not, had a moment with Jesus and it changed my life forever. So 17 years old, after wrestling with some things I've answered a call to ministry, I grew up here in South Atlanta, about 45 minutes from where the Church is located now. And, and then went to ministry went through a crisis and oh five with Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast of America, near near Mississippi Louisiana area, learned a lot in that season. And through that God burst of passion for families. What happened is we had a very large youth ministry. And in that youth ministry after the hurricane, we went, we lost about 300 students, our student ministry went from 350 is down to about 40 Kids and Iraq to me, I lost a little bit of my identity in that process, went through a faith crisis, not really a faith crisis, I would say an identity crisis, stress, anxiety, obviously, the whole coast had been obliterated. And so ministry looked different. And so I began to wrestle with what why God and so through that birth, this idea that if you're going to reach kids, you got to reach the fathers. So that's been where the whole thing with relevant Church started the dream behind everything that we do here. And then, of course, my wife has been with us this. We've been a part of this thing together the whole time. We got married in 2000s. childhood sweethearts, I should say child's in high school sweethearts. The funny thing is her sister, her sister was my eighth grade teacher, which is wild. And we developed a two year friendship out of that. We're in ministry, I'm in student ministry together, and then you know, the rest is history. So got two boys. 15 year old 11 year old and now man, we're just I guess living our best life ministry is not always easy, but we're in a good season.

Unknown Speaker 3:59

We'd love to ask the question called What do you do for fun?

Carl Nichols 4:03

Yeah, that's, that's fun. I think I used to love to play golf, but I've got some injuries in my back. I had too many surgeries to count. And so I've gotten to the pickleball stage I think now has been has been what we're doing. And oh Pickleball is going crazy worldwide. But now it's one of those games that no matter how athletic you are, you can go out there have a lot of fun so it allows our whole family to play nieces, nephews, cousins, all that so that's that's really what we're doing more for fun now. And of course my boys play travel basketball, and I enjoy being part of that within.

Unknown Speaker 4:36

Awesome. Before Yeah, pickleball it's, it's come to the UK and it's on the rise. I know. Now a few people who who play it. I've never partaken partakes myself in playing, but

David Mckeown 4:51

I feel I feel like I never know. I haven't heard of it before. Yeah, yeah. I mean,

Unknown Speaker 4:55

it's like a smaller version of tennis, is how I would if you just

Carl Nichols 4:59

take two Tennis and table tennis and find a happy medium. That's about what it is. That's right, my oldest son, I play against each other to get, you know, more intense exercise, but then a whole family comes out. And you can play doubles, which is obviously what most people play. And that's that's just kind of hanging out enjoying taking out the stresses of life. It's fun.

David Mckeown 5:23

Wonderful, hey, well, as we said, Great, I find out about more about your car. And you've touched a little bit there already by some of your experience in the sense of dealing with crisis. I wonder if we could just dig into that a little bit further for our listeners, because leaders go through crisis, many different times in different ways in their lives. So I wonder if you could just share your experience, maybe some of the stuff you've gone through, that you think would help the listeners who are here connecting with us?

Carl Nichols 5:51

Absolutely. I think in the first crisis, I think I went through as a crisis of faith when I was 17 years old, my mom had cancer and kind of rocked me in that season. I remember one statement she made that has impacted me for years. And seasons of crisis, I sat by her bed, the doctors basically said, we got one more test to run, we were pretty certain if this test is going to come back positive. And if it does, we're just going to send you home to die. So that was kind of a crisis of faith for me, sat by her bed, you know, volumise out and she just told me, she said if something happens to me, just remember God is still good. And in that season, I think it gave me a little bit of hope. So fast forward now in ministry. No, this is a leadership podcast. And so in ministry, I faced I guess two crisis that one was recently we all kind of went through this whole COVID pandemic conversation and what that looked like but in oh five, the Hurricane Katrina, conversation in my house is a mile off the beats are churches a mile off the beat 60,000 homes are destroyed in our communities. So that was a crisis that taught me a lot. But the first crisis and oh five with hurricane, I did not handle that nearly as well. I was 25 years and are 26 years old. This one, I feel like hindsight being 2020. Looking back learning, growing, maturing man, I learned a lot in COVID. Because I allow God to show me things versus just trying to do things just trying to solve problems. And so that's really, I think there's I've been travelling coaching pastors and coaching leaders here in the States for a while. And really, in the last two years I've taught taught this particular conversation about you know, six things I learned in COVID. That related to crisis, and it seems to be resonating a lot of people. So that's, that's the two major crisis that I've that I've been through and definitely responded differently to both of those. Yeah,

David Mckeown 7:38

hey, well, what why don't we dig into that those? What are those six things? Because you're sort of leaving us on the on the edge that yeah, so yeah.

Carl Nichols 7:47

I don't know how fast you want to go. I'll run through them as quickly as possible. And then I'll tell you what, as we run through them, just stop me along the way we can unpack any of them. How's that? I think the biggest one that I probably learned was that crisis, when you're talking about Church leadership, especially crisis magnifies dysfunction. And one of the things that I realised here, obviously, we'll stay with COVID, because I think everybody can relate is that I've said this before mould grows faster in the dark, and so you don't see it. So you turn the light on. And then you realise, oh, there's the light, there's the models. And so big problems are small problems that that we didn't have the courage to address, or we just, you know, shoved under the rug. And so I think when COVID hit, especially in the States, one of the biggest struggles was people were very much focused on, you know, filling buildings. Well, that poses a problem when you can't open your facility. And then we realised that the discipleship component of churches in America or the systems component, or the true connection that people had, was really dysfunctional, it was just propped up. It was a house of cards. And I think that not only was a cultural problem, I mean, a Church problem. But in the staffs in larger churches in America, you also found that who, who really was there was there was there problems? And then was there cultural problems in the staff? Were there issues that you know, existed that you didn't know, because now all of a sudden, you're working from home, you're trying to figure out how to do ministry without the everyday rhythms that you're used to. And so, I think that's been the biggest thing for me is that the dysfunction in the Church COVID just set a real big light on it. And I don't think that's unique to COVID I think that can be applied to, you know, sports, it can be applied to family it can be applied to or any organisation, when it comes to that if there's if there's a dysfunction, when a crisis comes, something's going to break or something's going to at least be more evident in the process. So that's the first one. I think that's the biggest one that I learned. Wow.

Unknown Speaker 9:42

I was gonna ask call just on that. So So let's say that dysfunction comes about how did you how did you deal with that? Because I think a lot of churches even in the midst of a crisis, might just try and sweep that under the rug again, or even put it in the dark Okay, again, how did you, you know, kind of, uh, how do you coach people to begin to deal with those these dysfunctions that come about because of the crisis?

Carl Nichols 10:09

I think that's, that's a great question. So we just take the crisis that we've been through the last, you know, our previous two and a half years, I think everybody thought in American states, we believe, okay, Church will shut down for three or four weeks. And then we'll just go back to doing what we're doing. And everybody kept hanging on to let's get back to let's get back to what all you're getting back to is what was dysfunctional before. So the leaders that took a real hard inward look and said, Okay, what, let's diagnose some problems, let's diagnose some issues. And let's start building something that's sustainable beyond, you know, a building or beyond any crisis, for that matter, how can we make sure that the mission really goes back to Mission our mission is fulfilled in any crisis. And so we look at our values, we look at our mission, and we look at our systems. And our strategy is all of those things matter? I would say prior, prior to a crisis, or before crisis strikes you and I all know, I think we know. We don't always know what we don't know, I say that to people all the time. But the internally, intuitively, we know where our organisation is weaker, or where we're weak, or whether we want to face that or not. And so we knew that our discipleship, we were working on some discipleship conversations in here at relevant Church in South Atlanta. Prior to COVID, we had, we had all these things, ready to go for discipleship, and we were getting ready to launch some things and the problem was COVID hit before we could get those things off the ground. So we already knew they were weak. And so you have to recognise those things. You have to see those things before the crisis. Because if you don't, obviously, it's going to break now, the good news is when the crisis hit, we already were aware. So the diagnosing of the issue saying what's wrong, why are people not coming back to Church, so to speak, why are people seemingly disconnected wires, our online attendance every week, what we thought was gonna stay up? Just, I think we believe the myth that it was gonna stay at, why is it dropping? Why are people feeling less and less connected? So all of those we knew the root problem was there was not deep rooted connection and discipleship going on in our Church. So that was a dysfunction for us on a staffing side of things. I think I'm a pretty nice guy. People might perceive me as more of a dominant personality. But when it comes to my staff, I really care about my staff, I care about the people on our team. And I think what happened was some of the things that probably should have been addressed prior to, you know, a crisis became more and more evident when, especially when their identity or their ministry, or maybe their identity was lack, you know, tied up in their ministry, and now they've lost their ministry and they don't know what to do. And now all their emotions are coming out. And so there were some staffing components, not a tonne. In the States, there's a there's a term called the Great resignation. And I don't know if that's something that you guys have heard there, but about a year after COVID struck all the specially people who were already on the team, you know, tinkering on burnout, man just started resigning, resigning was on always looking for greener grass. Now, the new term in the States is there's a great regret. So I think those that moved on Prop, you know, are those that were struggling prior to the crisis. As a leader, we've got to deal with that when things are good, because when they're bad, obviously, things crumble a lot more. So that's probably, I guess, I don't know if that makes a tonne of sense. You're trying to give you some snapshot in our organisation. But yeah, you have to deal with problems when they're small.

David Mckeown 13:26

Yeah, I think that's the key, really, rather than ignoring the issues. I think the crisis just brings the stuff to the surface. It's already there. And it's dealing with this stuff. I guess you're learning this idea of dealing with the stuff early. Yeah, rather than trying to avoid it. That's a lot of leaders think, well, I'll deal with that issue at this point. But actually, sometimes you've got to deal with it back then. So the bigger issue is you're saying, Yeah, that's what what are the other five things? And we've done one? Yes. The other five things you've

Carl Nichols 13:57

so I think, I think they all kind of fall to some degree underneath that, that one. And so they all subset about that one. So here's, here's the one that I would say is next, you have to know your unit unique identity as an organisation and as a leader, because what happens is you start comparing, and you realise that all of a sudden, I don't know who I am, I was tied up in my ministry or my platform, or my ability or whatever it is, and so you don't know who you are as an organisation. And therefore you start trying to copy everything else everybody else is doing. And so for me, I'm one that have said to Said to to my friends to people, I coach Stop copying and pasting from other churches or other organisations, it doesn't mean we can't learn from them. But who are you? What is your unique identity? That's such a huge component of what we do, because if we don't know who we are, what happened with us during during the last crisis with with people not being in charge and COVID of the various things here's one of the things that happened with us is there was no manual to copy because nobody knew what they were doing. And so if you don't know your unique identity, you haven't let Get your organisation to a place where you know how to diagnose and see who you are and fulfil the mission that God has given you. Now all of a sudden, you don't know what to do if all you've done is copy and pasted everybody else's stuff. So you got to know who you are and what God's called you to do. And then one of my staff said this, this, this rocked me during COVID, a little bit of history here, we have a new building, our Church was exploding. The seven weeks leading up to, to our shutdown, our Church grew by 700 people. And it was exploding. We were turning people away from our main twos middle services. On Sunday, we launched a fifth service and we had a seat 400 seat auditorium, we've had as many as 2200 people on campus at one time, or on a Sunday in a 400 seat auditorium over those five services. So things are exploding, we have a new building 1100 seat auditorium coming out of the ground, we're only, you know, going on 10 years old when this happens. And we're learning we don't we don't have the best live streaming, we are on low budget cameras, low budget filming, we're going into a nicer auditorium, we're putting all that we put all the money into that. But we don't have the knowledge, the know how the wisdom to know how to even operate all this new equipment, the building is being basically shelled in when when everything shuts down. And so we had a huge learning curve. And in that I don't know about you guys, everybody goes online and starts watching. And the funny joke around here was everybody had terrible online sound mixes. So the band sounded horrendous, no matter who you listen to, and everybody was trying, and even the gods who didn't have anything, we're trying very hard to produce something and it was really bad. And so the worship leader at the time, he heard his quote, and he shared it with us because it's easy to look at what everybody else is doing, especially on a larger scale and start comparing because you don't know who you are. And he made this quote, that change changed my life. Really, he said, Success is not measured by comparison, but rather about progress. And that really impacted me because now what we're saying is, okay, rather than trying to be somebody else, or look at somebody else, are we better this week than we were last week. And so man that's changed our whole perspective of of leading. So that's number two. Any thoughts? Questions? If not, I'll just keep going. But no. So here's the third one, clarity is more and more important in certainty. I didn't know what I was doing at times, but I had to even even if I didn't know what I was doing, I had to let our people know that I didn't know what I was doing. Rather than making something up, I think I think the problem is, is we tend to want to have all the answers. And sometimes the answer is I don't know, it's real simple. And so there's a book, I'll recommend, at the end, it's just a little bit more about it. But it's called procrastinate on purpose, there were decisions that we just waited to make, because we didn't have clarity. And then the fourth one was this culture is the top leadership priority. So in crisis, we can go fix all of these issues, or try to diagnose all the but the systems may be wrong, the strategies may be wrong, all that stuff is, is important. But if the culture is wrong, it doesn't matter what you do. And so I think, um, we'll talk more about culture in a few moments. But there's, there's some things there that I think that can help us, you know, really sort of culture can help you survive a lot. The fifth one is is slowing down to speed up can be very valuable. We have a statement that we've added to our staff language here, and it's we're playing the long game. The long game is something that's sustainable. And I have a little dog, this is a kind of a funny story to help us understand. I have a little dog at the bagel that was given to us, and she loves to eat. And she She will eat at her normal time. And then there's something that triggers you later, and she wants to eat again later. And so she will, she'll come begging for food. And so what we had another dog and we were house sitting for about six months, while my sister in law built their house. And so she would eat her food and the other dogs food. And she started Gangway to scarf it down, it was like a race who can get to the food first. Well, in the meantime, I realised this dog's gonna die of being overweight. And so we had to get her a slow feeder bowl. And that slow feeder bowl is it's harder for her to eat that up, but it makes her healthier slows her down. So she's healthier long term. And I thought to myself so many times we try to do things so quickly that it's really unhealthy. It might be large, it might look large, it might look sustainable. But behind the scenes, it's falling apart. And so we say, Look, we're playing the long game here. We're building something that lasts and that's not my personality. That's not the way I'm wired. I want it all and I want it now. And so that's that's the hardest. And then here's the last one. Crisis creates an opportunity for change. This one, I think so I'll just give you an example. When when our Church shut down, we have one building that's at 400 people we were you know, as many as 2200 people on campus. We had our kids when there we were building a second building. That one building had one parking lot. One entrance from the main highway. One entrance to the building. That was it. The main entrance of people came in. So when people came to Church on Sunday, they they came in when everybody came in the same enters everybody part of the same parties, but everybody entered the same building. When they came back, the building was finished. I was speaking to cameras for a month before we reopen the building. And when they came back, there's four parking lots, two entrances from two separate roads, and three entrances to the building. Well, I remember having to train people, anytime they were changes that were happening, when, okay, next Sunday, things are going to look like this and all the y's and the what and the questions we're having here that people are just happy to be back. People are happy to say, tell us what to do. We'll do whatever. We're just happy to be together. And I think sometimes I heard Rick Warren say this years ago, growth brings change, change brings loss, loss brings pain, pain brings grief. And so anytime we're growing and we make changes, there's this loss, pain and grief cycle, we're in the middle of crisis, people are just saying, Help me, show me, give me direction, give me wisdom. And so I personally believe that you can make change faster in crisis than you can any other time. I can give you two examples. One is a friend of mine and pastors a Church. It's more traditional. It's about 20 minutes from from where I'm at right now. They were a little more old school and choir, very wealthy Church, when when they went online, they were like, our own lives not very good. We have choir, it's not it's not the way they really wanted to do Church, but they were slowly changing. Not that there's anything wrong with a choir, we still bring back acquired times for fun. But there was slowly changing, but it was taking so long to move the needle. Well, when they went along, they hired a production company to come in and do all their production stuff live and made it incredible when in the course they were a little more rural area that area than us they opened up earlier. And man, they improved. So many things change so many things. It was like a different Church when I opened the doors. Chick fil A in the States is we call it Christian chicken because it closed on Sundays. It's you know, it's a worldwide phenomenon. Chick fil A during COVID tore down so many of their buildings and rebuilt them for a new way of doing customer service. And they would say by September one, you got to have your building done. And I can think of the 20 Chick Fil A's within driving distance of here within 45 minutes of here. I bet about a dozen of them totally on their entire buildings, redid everything during the crisis and then opened back up and didn't just said, Okay, let's go. So I think crisis is an incredible time for change. Oftentimes, though, we try to go back and do all the old things. Or we get lost in the shuffle rather than saying what opportunities are ahead of us. So that's it.

David Mckeown 22:37

Yeah, like that. I think some of the things you've mentioned during card, there's some real positives when we hit crisis. And there's some real challenges. Absolutely. I guess we're gonna get a bit of both in there, aren't we? You know, so it brings stuff to the surface. stuff maybe we've been avoiding, but also brings opportunity. Absolutely. Which is a brilliant, brilliant way to think of crisis as well. Because because we don't often think of crisis that way. We often think of just the negative don't wait around the crisis. So yeah, thanks for sharing those six things. And we'll stick those in the show notes. Yeah, definitely.

Unknown Speaker 23:08

Definitely. Yeah. So the ways that you've given us the ways to connect with you are through a website, www dot the good life.cc. Also, you can follow Carl Nichols, on word on Instagram, and also on Facebook is Nichols. Carl, just after facebook.com. But Carl, it's been amazing to have you on the church explained podcast and thanks so much for your time.

Carl Nichols 23:38

No, that's great, that good life podcast that good life.cc Is the podcast that we do here and so you can I just link that rather than putting all the platforms and so if you want more content, more conversations around just how to find the good life in Christ, man that's where you can find it. So thank you all for having me. It's been a joy

David Mckeown 23:54

it's been a pleasure to have you with us a big shout out to all that you're doing with Church that are relevant Church and all the guys on the team and all the staff as well. It's it's yeah, what's happening yeah,

Unknown Speaker 24:05

so that's it for the church explained podcast want to thank you for joining us on this episode. Don't forget you to rate review, subscribe and share this episode. Wherever you're consuming this content. And don't forget there are free resources for you and your Church at IKON dot Church forward slash open but we look forward to seeing you next time on the church explained podcast. We'll see you soon.

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