Announcer: 0:06

Welcome to the Leading Conversations podcast sponsored by the Excel Leadership Network. On each episode, JD Paring will have conversations with church planting pastors and leaders from around the country. You can learn more about how to connect with Excel at the end of this podcast. Let's join JD now and listen in on this leading conversation.

J.D. Pearring: 0:29

Well, welcome to another edition of the Leading Conversations podcast with Excel Leadership Network, and today we're thrilled to have the great, the wonderful, the mighty, Karl Vaders with us. Thank you, Karl, for being here.

Karl Vaters: 0:42

Well, thank you for those adjectives. I hope I can live up to at least one of them.

J.D. Pearring: 0:49

Now you're in Southern California. You're in Fountain Valley, I am, which is just right next to Huntington Beach, right.

Karl Vaters: 0:56

Yeah, I'm in one of those towns that nobody knows, but we, you know, I've got to describe it as the next two. Yeah, we're in, we've got we border five towns Huntington Beach, costa Mesa, westminster, that kind of a thing. So every town around us is more famous than us.

J.D. Pearring: 1:10

Yeah, Okay, well, I grew up not too far down the street from you in Los Alamitos. Oh, yeah, yeah, which is kind of the same thing. It's next to Long Beach, next to Steel Beach, yeah.

Karl Vaters: 1:23

So, and how long have you been?

J.D. Pearring: 1:27

32 years. Well, you find a good thing and stick with it.

Karl Vaters: 1:30

So yeah, that was the plan. Actually, when we came 32 years ago, our kids were three, five and two, five and eight and our prayer was we wanted to stay in a church at least until our youngest graduated from high school, so that they could look back and say this was home, at least until our youngest graduated from high school, so that they could look back and say this was home. So when my youngest graduated from high school I don't know 10, 12 years ago, whenever it was longer than that, I thought, you know, that's something worth thanking the Lord for. So I got up in front of the congregation and I started saying, hey, this was our prayer when we first came here. And this has happened and our son graduated this Sunday.

Karl Vaters: 2:02

And I look around and I'm seeing looks of panic in the congregation's faces and I realized, oh, they think I'm quitting and I went. Oh, no, I'm just saying thank God that he kept us here this long. We're planning to stay much longer as well, but this was we. Just think these and you can see the Michal relax like, oh, okay, because it sounded like, hey, the Lord sent us here until this time and now it's time to go. But it wasn't. So we. Yeah, we stayed at least till then, and we've stuck around another. I guess it's been at least 15 years since then as well. So, yeah, the Lord has blessed us here.

J.D. Pearring: 2:32

That's wonderful, just by the way you know. I know we had a similar goal when we moved here. I want to stay here till at least the first three graduate high school, and we have stayed way beyond that. But there's something about having that childhood home for the kids that gives them stability I just mentioned to you that our daughter was a missionary in China Something about her being able to come home, go to what used to be her room and there's some stability there. And I know a lot of us last kid graduates we move, we downsize. We might actually take the kids' foundation from them when we do that.

Karl Vaters: 3:19

And obviously the Lord calls different people to move in different ways. But I think longevity for the church and for the pastor's home is usually far more helpful than bouncing around as much as we often do.

J.D. Pearring: 3:34

Well, tell us your story. Tell us, growing up, how you came to Christ.

Karl Vaters: 3:38

Yeah, I'm actually a third generation pastor, so my father was a pastor, my grandfather, his dad, was a pastor as well and I was was, you know, the typical preacher's kid in the church all the time. And there was, there were special services during the week, and so upstairs there was adult services and downstairs they had the kids service and they had this kid speaker for the week while the adults were being spoken to by a grown-up upstairs. And at one point on one of the evenings it was an altar call that I'd heard hundreds of. I was six years old but I'd heard hundreds of altar calls. And during this altar call that this kid's evangelist did, he said you know, this is a decision that you need to make for yourself. Even if your parents are Christians, even if your parents are leaders in the church your parents might even be, your parent might even be a pastor of a church it's still a decision you need to make for yourself. And when he said that, I went oh, oh, I haven't made that decision myself. And I went forward and I bowed my head and I gave my life to Christ at like six years of age, and it stuck. I've served the Lord ever since then. I've. You know. I've gone through seasons of doubt and concern and all of that stuff, but I've never stopped serving the Lord since I was six years of age, and then, when I was about to head into college and wondering what I was going to do with my life, I had a bunch of people come to me and say you're called to ministry just like your dad, and if they had not included those last four words, I'd have been more open to listen to it. When they said just like your dad, that always made me pause. I love my dad. He's still alive, he's still my greatest example of ministry. But I knew that pastoring was not a family business that you went into because your dad did it. I knew that. I knew I had to have my own calling to ministry, and so whenever anybody said just like your dad, it was like is that all this is, though? So for several years, I kind of pushed back against it and looked in other ways until finally, I just had to go, you know what? Just because they think it's me following in my dad's footsteps. I know it's not. It's me following what the Lord has for my life.

Karl Vaters: 5:40

So, and about my I just in the middle of my second year of college, I was going to junior college, getting my general ed out of the way. I decided, okay, lord, if this is you, um, I need your help because I was terrified to speak in front of a group. Like made me ill to speak in front of a group. So I said, okay, I'm going to take a speech class and if I can't get through this speech without wetting myself, then, lord, you're going to have to call me somewhere else because I've got to be able to speak in front of a group. So I was just panicked. I was panicked, I turned around, I stood, I looked at the audience and went why am I scared of these guys? And I did my speech and I sat down and the teacher handed me a note that said please see me about competitive speech. And I went. Okay, thank you for the answer, bolded and underlined, lord. I guess this is what I'm called to do. And I went to Bible college and I've been in full-time ministry ever since.

J.D. Pearring: 6:37

Yeah, Wow, you're so good, they wanted you to go into the competitive speech. You're so good, they wanted you to go into the competitive speech.

Karl Vaters: 6:45

Yeah, it went from absolute panic to this is the easiest thing in the world in a heartbeat, and it was one of those moments where I just needed something really definitive from the Lord, and he gave it to me very definitively.

J.D. Pearring: 7:00

Well, hey, let's take a step back. You were raised. You said third generation pastor. What is something that your parents and maybe even your grandparents did?

Karl Vaters: 7:11

well, and what's one thing you did differently with your kids. What they did well was they behaved in the home the way they behaved in public. I have never seen my parents in a false moment. My dad is in the house what he is in the pulpit, and my mom is in public what she is in private. And my grandfather and grandmother were that way before them. They were people of integrity. I've literally never seen a false note from any of them. They've made mistakes and they've admitted them, but they've never lived like they're perfect in front of other people either.

Karl Vaters: 7:56

So that has always been something that I've admired and that I have wanted to follow in my own life as well, and I believe that if you talked to my kids, they would probably say the same thing about me, and I know they'd say the same thing about their mother, my wife. We are in private who we are in public. They call it cognitive dissonance right, when you're trying to present yourself as one thing but you're actually another thing. And the wider that cognitive dissonance is, the greater the the emotional and spiritual health, ill health you're going to have. And I I I can't live with very much separation between my public and private lives. It just tears me up to pieces. So I have to be in public who I am in private, and my dad and my parents and my grandparents taught me that.

J.D. Pearring: 8:48

Was there anything that you did like well, remarkably, or just maybe a little bit different than your parents? With your kids. As a pastor's, you know they were pastor's kids. As a pastor's, you know they were pastor's kids.

Karl Vaters: 9:03

No, not really. I really followed their lead. Things like my dad never used me or my sisters as a sermon illustration unless he asked us first and got our enthusiastic permission to do so. Like if he came to me and said, hey, you know that thing you did, I want to use it as an illustration, and I went if I'd go, yeah, okay, I guess he wouldn't use it. If I was like, yeah, I want people to know that, then he would use it and I did the same thing for my kids.

Karl Vaters: 9:31

So my kids never had to sit in the service and wonder what kind of weird thing they did is going to be used in the next sermon, Because I asked them in advance and it had to be enthusiastic permission that they gave me. They had to go. Yeah, I want to be a part of that. That would be cool, and otherwise I didn't do that. So I never asked them to behave like preacher's kids. I asked them to behave like our kids. Here's how we behave in our house, not because it's the preacher's house, but again, I learned that from my parents and we followed that up in our home. My parents never gave me anything to rebel against. Why would I not want to do it their way. It's working, so yeah.

J.D. Pearring: 10:15

That's an amazing statement. My parents never gave me anything to rebel against.

Karl Vaters: 10:19

That's probably the key to parenting, if you just want to give your kids anything to rebel against. Now I've had this conversation with my sisters recently and they both agree with that, but they both would follow that up with we rebelled anyway. I didn't. I didn't see anything to rebel against and so didn't bother. My sisters had all kinds of issues and they'll talk about it and we'll joke about it today and they're like yeah, we were just rebellious type and you just never were. I was a rule follower. I'm looking around going hey, these grownups who love me and whose lives are working are telling me that this is how their life works. Why would I not do that?

J.D. Pearring: 10:59

Were you the oldest, or yeah, or yeah? Yeah, I still am. If you're still, that's good. They haven't passed you out, so yeah. So you said, you went to bible college. Where'd you go? Where'd you go to school?

Karl Vaters: 11:14

I went to bethany college in santa cruz, california, which later became bethany university, which closed about 20 25 years ago, um, and then I got got my master's degree in 2020 from Vanguard University here in Southern California in Costa Mesa.

J.D. Pearring: 11:32

Okay, great. So from Bible school did you go right into pastoring?

Karl Vaters: 11:37

I did. I got in my little VW convertible bug loaded up with all of my worldly possessions and drove from Modesto, California, up to Susanville, California, a little tiny town north of Lake Tahoe in hunting country. Prison town right, yeah, very close to that, yeah, yeah.

J.D. Pearring: 11:59

And that was your first pastorate.

Karl Vaters: 12:01

That was my well. I was an associate pastor. I got there, I was there for three months and the pastor I was working for received a vote of no confidence from the congregation and he left. And here I was, three months out of Bible college, barely in my 20s. I was literally just 20 years old. I started college early and here I was interim pastor of a congregation. So I got thrown into the deep end pretty quickly.

Karl Vaters: 12:29

How was that experience? It was very, very good. My three generations of pastoral ministry helped me with that, because I had a better general understanding of what church leadership looked like than most people in my position who had just graduated from Bible college. Because I didn't just have three months worth of experience, I had 20 years worth of experience in some ways at that point. So that helped, and it was a good six or seven months until they brought a new pastor in. At one point one of them suggested maybe I should become the pastor, but I was wise enough to know that I wasn't wise enough to do that yet, so I turned that down. But it was a very good experience it gave me very quickly. I had to learn some things that most associate pastors don't learn until about a decade in.

J.D. Pearring: 13:19

Yeah, being in that number one chair, even as an interim associate, there's something about it, yep. So then what? Where'd you go from there?

Karl Vaters: 13:30

After that I left that church because the new pastor came in, not because I had somewhere else to go. My dad at that time was taking a year-long sabbatical, so I spent a little time with him until they came to a church in Silicon Valley in what is now maybe the most expensive real estate in the world, you know, in the Google Apple region of the world, you know in the South San Francisco Bay Area and he went to a church there. I went with him. Basically I just went because I had nowhere else to go. I'll help you unpack your boxes until I find another place in ministry. And when I got there there was this gorgeous redhead in the congregation and a year later I married her and a little over a year after that we had our first baby. So what was going to be four months of helping my dad get settled ended up being four years, one wife and two kids later, before we finally left.

J.D. Pearring: 14:23

Yeah, and then what? Where'd you go from there?

Karl Vaters: 14:33

Then we went to a small chapel in the middle of the Redwoods in Santa Cruz, California.

J.D. Pearring: 14:37

Really.

Karl Vaters: 14:37

Okay, yeah, yeah, santa Cruz for those who aren't from the California area, santa Cruz then in the 90s and still today in the 2020s, is trapped in the 1960s. Santa Cruz is where all the old hippies went at the end of that era and still are today. And so we had this little tiny chapel up in the mountains where you wanted to be really careful driving into certain neighborhoods because people were growing stuff in the mountains, where you wanted to be really careful driving into certain neighborhoods because people were growing stuff in the backyard and you didn't want to be found in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time. But we were there for four years and had a really wonderful time with some really great people at that church.

J.D. Pearring: 15:17

Yeah, Well, if you drove a Volkswagen Bug at one time, you did understand the culture of Santa Cruz, I guess.

Karl Vaters: 15:24

And I was driving it then, which let me get away with a lot. It fit the culture very, very much.

J.D. Pearring: 15:32

Wow, I just had Dan Kimball and Renee Schleffler on and somebody else from Santa Cruz, so that's just an interesting place, even today for ministry and life. And I kid those guys about the product in their hair, but I'm not seeing that with you. You don't have the Santa Cruz haircut.

Karl Vaters: 16:00

Yeah, well, there are multiple Santa Cruz haircuts. The product is still something they're hanging on to. But this is a place where, for years, uc Santa Cruz the university there did not give letter grades for decades. And it was finally when I was there in the 1980s that they realized they have to give letter grades so that people can transfer to other schools, and so they started giving letter grades and then they decided we're going to really become like normal schools. We're going to have a mascot, but the mascot that they picked was the banana slug, so it's the UC Santa Cruz banana slugs, and that gives you just a picture of kind of the way they think there.

J.D. Pearring: 16:38

Santa Cruz. Where'd you go from there?

Karl Vaters: 16:41

From there we went to just north of the san francisco bay area. We spent 20 very, very long months in a very, very difficult church that nearly drove me out of ministry.

J.D. Pearring: 16:53

Oh right, yeah, talk a little bit about that experience, can you?

Karl Vaters: 16:57

um, yeah, um, we came, we, we followed a good pastor who did very good work, but he was older and he actually retired after that church and so they kind of looked up to the pastor like a father and almost a grandfather figure. And I came in with three young kids and I was much younger and they didn't know how to make the shift from the grandfather, who just kind of knew everything and shared wisdom, to a young pastor who was trying to say, okay, no, you're supposed to do the work here, I'm supposed to train you to do the work here. Let's get together on mission together. And it was such a different vibe they never quite understood that and I never really grasped how deep their passivity was and how deep some underlying emotional toxicity was. And so, one, the mismatch between my leadership and them and two, the underlying toxic behaviors from them, and three, my inexperience, all came together into a very, very difficult stew to where, when we did leave that church after 20 months, I really debated my call to ministry and my wife at that point probably wished I would have stopped the debate and just chosen not to go into ministry because she was feeling so beaten up from it.

Karl Vaters: 18:27

It got to the point where my eight-year-old daughter would come home from church in tears because there was a birthday party for one of her friends the day before and she hadn't been invited and I couldn't tell her. It was because the father of her friend didn't like me as a pastor and so they weren't inviting my daughter to their kids' birthday parties. And that was when I said okay, come after me. That's one thing, but when you start hurting my daughter, that's different. I love you people, because Jesus tells me I have to, but I don't like you, so I'm not going to stick around, yeah.

J.D. Pearring: 19:01

Wow, what was next after that?

Karl Vaters: 19:04

You obviously stayed in ministry.

Karl Vaters: 19:07

Yeah, I stayed in ministry basically for a while only because I didn't know any other way to put food on the table for my family. I admit that I stayed in ministry for several years, not because I felt called, but because I didn't know what else to do to put food on the table. That didn't last too long, because I realized you can't stay in ministry for that, but for a little while. It was just that I came then to a church in Orange County, california, and that was 32 years ago. The church that we're still at. And this church had been through five pastors in the previous 10 years. So they were really in crisis. In fact, they had come really close to having a vote to close the church and they thought, instead of voting to close the church, let's bring one more pastor in and if it doesn't work this time, number six, then we'll close the church and we'll be done with this thing. And so I was that pastor.

Karl Vaters: 19:54

So I came in as a hurting pastor. They were a very hurting church. That's a combination I do not recommend, but the Lord used them to help me heal and the Lord used us to help them heal, and 32 years later we're still there. I was the lead pastor for 25 years. I had the same youth pastor for the entire 25 years and seven years ago he became the lead pastor. I stepped aside and became a teaching pastor and ran some of the departments and then a year ago I stepped aside completely and I'm no longer on staff at the church. I now do the ministry of helping small churches thrive full time. But that is still our home church where we still worship on Sundays so that when we come off the road from our travel and teaching other pastors, we get to come home and be refilled and replenished at our home church where we've been for 32 years.

J.D. Pearring: 20:40

Oh, wow, I didn't realize that I want to talk to you about your writing, but talk about the transition. How was it doing the handoff and then stepping completely away? How has that been?

Karl Vaters: 20:51

Yeah, it was great and it's something—here's the thing the pastoral transition is the most dangerous thing that churches do. As a normal part of church functioning, you're going to have pastoral transitions. That's just life. Even if a pastor stays till they die, at some point there's going to be a pastoral transition. So every church has to do it.

Karl Vaters: 21:11

But most churches don't do it very well at all and I've noticed, especially over the years, that one of the hardest things to do is for a pastor to follow a long-term successful pastor. So when you've got a long-term successful pastor, you actually make a difficult situation for the next person. They usually end up having what we've called the sacrificial lamb, somebody who kind of comes in and gets beat up for a couple years. You know, because you're not doing it the way so-and-so used to do it who we loved, who was here for decades, and it's really hard to live up to that previous well-loved long-term pastor. And I started looking around at year 15, 16, 17 and realizing, okay, unless we can come up with some way of doing succession, well, here I'm actually making it difficult for the next pastor. So what are we going to do? And I didn't have any answers, but I was really actively thinking and praying about it.

Karl Vaters: 22:03

And then the youth pastor, who is a lifer youth pastor, who had said hundreds of times he was never called to be a lead pastor and meant it started feeling a call to become a lead pastor but didn't feel a call to leave the church and didn't know how to approach me with that. So he came to me one day. We'd been serving together for about 23 years at this point and we're having a conversation and he's feeling uncomfortable in the conversation. I'm going what is going on here? We've been doing this for 23 years. We've literally had entire conversations with nothing more than grunts. We know each other, we're not nervous around, but he's nervous around me and he's trying to express something about ministry and all of a sudden it hits me oh, you want my job, ministry. And all of a sudden it hits me oh, you want my job. And he's like no, I don't. I go. Well, then, what do you want? Just say it. He says you feel called to be a lead pastor. He goes yeah, and I said but you're not feeling called to leave this church, that's what you're telling me. Yeah, I said well, that's my job. He goes yeah, I guess it is. But he says I don't have a problem with how you're pastoring. I don't want you not to be the pastor you will always be my pastor but I'm feeling called to be a lead pastor and I'm not feeling called to leave this church and I don't know what that means. And I said, yeah, that's a weird one. So I said I'll tell you what. Let's sit down once a week and talk this through and pray about it until the Lord gives us an answer. It until the Lord gives us an answer. And he was like, okay, so it took us about four months meeting once a week when I was in town, and some weeks it was just you got anything? Nope, you got anything Nope, let's pray about it. We go. And other times it was what about this, what about that? And at the end of four months I said you know what? I think this answers a whole bunch of questions.

Karl Vaters: 23:39

One the ministry of helping small churches thrive is really growing. I'm gone more and more Sundays and you're having to cover more and more Sundays. I don't feel like I'm called to leave this church, but I do need to get some kind of relief from basically two full-time ministry jobs right now. So I said what if you become the lead pastor, I stay on staff with you, I'll cover some of the preaching for you, I'll oversee these three departments, which were departments that I could do in my sleep because I'd been doing them for 24 years at that point and that I knew weren't his skill set. And I said I'll cover those departments and I'll help you with that. I'll stay on staff as their teaching pastor, I'll help with the transition and we'll see where it goes from there. And he went yeah, that sounds like the Lord.

Karl Vaters: 24:23

So when we went to the congregation and we started talking about it, there was real concern because I had been the pastor at that point for 23, 24 years. He had been with me the entire 23, 24 years. They were seeing my ministry of helping small churches thrive growing. They were seeing I was gone 25 to 30% of the Sundays of the year out, preaching and teaching and helping other pastors and other churches, and they were cheering that on. There was never a single moment where anybody said you should be home more often. They saw it as an extension of our church.

Karl Vaters: 24:52

But they knew that as this grows, is that going to mean we're going to lose Pastor Carl?

Karl Vaters: 24:56

And if we lose Pastor Carl, who's been here for 25 years, what happens to Pastor Gary, who's been the youth pastor with him for 25 years? The idea that the youth pastor who's been there under a different pastor for 25 years can now stay under a new pastor seems impossible. So if I go, he goes, and in a small church especially. How do we survive that? So when we went to them and said here's the deal I'm going to step aside, gary's going to step up, he's going to be the lead pastor, I'm going to stay on under him, and they started realizing wait a minute, we get to shift leadership, we get to bring in somebody younger, we get to keep the guy we love. We don't lose anybody. It's win, win, win all the way across the board. So it went from real concern and almost to the point of panic to instantly the Lord gave us an answer that gave everybody a win and that you know, as you know, almost never happens, but the Lord gave that to us.

J.D. Pearring: 25:53

Wow, Wow. Now you did that for seven years.

Karl Vaters: 25:56

you said, but then you yeah, I did that for six years and then last year this ministry was growing fast enough and was full-time enough that when I started realizing, when I come home, even the occasional burden of preaching and even the burden of running three departments that I know how to run was just more than I could deal with. I needed to be able to come to a church and be pastored and receive fellowship and get input and not have any responsibilities. So I trained people to take over all three of the departments that I was running. By then he had already raised a preaching team, so there's three people in the preaching team, so they didn't need me for that anymore. So a year ago it was our last Sunday as on staff at the church and the congregation gave us a wonderful farewell Sunday and honored us in extraordinary and beautiful ways for 32 years of serving the church on staff. But it's still our home church. I was there last Sunday, I'll be there next Sunday, any Sunday. We're not on the road, we're here and we're home, yep.

J.D. Pearring: 26:58

How's that transition been for you the last year?

Karl Vaters: 27:03

It's weird to be in your home church, where you've been on staff as a pastor for 32 years, and not have anything to do on Sunday. Saturday nights are awesome, yeah, because there's no burden of what I got to do, how I got to prepare. Wait a minute, we don't have this set up for tomorrow. Saturday nights are awesome. Sunday mornings are weird. There's nothing wrong with it, there's nothing bad about it, but it's weird Like I can go to somebody else's church and just be a congregation member and just worship and have conversations, because I've never been responsible for anything there. But to be at a church that I bore the entire burden of pastoring for 25 years and bore some burden of pastoral leadership for 32 years, and now to show up and not have anything to do is just weird. So I'm getting used to that.

J.D. Pearring: 27:53

How has it been for your wife? We did a similar transition about 10 plus years ago, handing the church off to my son, and we stayed in. That was not as big a transition for me as it was for my wife, so how's it been for her?

Karl Vaters: 28:10

No, it's been good for her, she's enjoyed it. She was never heavily involved. In fact there were a couple of people along the through the years that would call her the unpastor's wife as a compliment, because when we came I said when you hire me, you're not hiring two people, you're hiring one. My wife will be a regular member. She will be a part of things. She will probably lead departments when they're needed to be led. But you cannot expect that she will step up because she's the pastor's wife. She's my wife and I happen to be the pastor and they were willing to do that. So my wife has always spent a lot of years working outside the church, has occasionally led women's ministries, led our kids' ministries department, overseeing the nursery, but then as soon as someone else is ready she stepped aside and she let them take it. So she was never as invested in the work of the church as I was, like on a staff member kind of level. So it's been less of a transition for her than it was for me, and now she and I work fully. Our full-time work now is in the Ministry of Helping Small Churches, thrive, which was already active at the time we stepped aside from Cornerstone, so basically part of the reason.

Karl Vaters: 29:25

In fact, I had a conversation a few years ago. I was on a podcast with Kerry Newhoff and we were talking about pastoral transition and Kerry had gone through a similar pastoral transition with his associate just about six months ahead of us doing it. So we kind of paralleled each other just by six months delay and after that all happened and it worked well for both of us. I was on a podcast with Kerry and he asked me. He said he said well, we were able to do it at our church and, carl, you were able to do it at your church.

Karl Vaters: 29:55

Why is it that so many pastors like us, when they step aside, they have a hard time letting go? Because in those pastoral transitions the biggest challenge is almost always that the older pastor who sticks around has a hard time letting go. That's the hardest time. So he said why, like he was truly confused why do they have such a hard time letting go? You and I didn't.

Karl Vaters: 30:15

My answer to him was Kerry, we got stuff to do. Yes, that's a big thing. Yeah, you're busy, I'm busy. But when most pastors leave in a situation like that and stick around the church, they're sticking around because they got nothing else to do. They've gone into retirement and they're just walking into this void and it's really. You can't operate in a void. And so they're wanting to do something because you can't just stop that train instantaneously and expect nothing to get jostled around. So in those transitions, especially if you are staying at the church you were in, maybe because you're retired or maybe because you're doing some other ministry keep busy doing some form of ministry so you don't become an irritant to the next pastor.

J.D. Pearring: 31:05

If you're a leader, you pretty much have to have something that you're leading, otherwise you're going to stick around and cause some issues. Well hey, you've mentioned several times you help. Small churches thrive. I've written some books. I mean, how did all of that happen?

Karl Vaters: 31:23

Yeah, you know where I live. Orange County, california, is one of four or five megachurch centrals in the country. So we live a mile from the original Calvary Chapel. We've got the original Vineyard Crystal Cathedral Church on the Way, angelus Temple, Saddleback Church, mariner's Church, all within a very short drive of here. And so you come to Orange County and you look around, you see all these mega ministries and you think, well, me too and I moved here at the height of the church growth movement.

Karl Vaters: 31:54

So I took all of that in and I applied all the church growth stuff and it didn't work. I mean, some of it worked, but it did not produce anything close to the numerical results that they seemed to promise. And so I really started debating. Maybe I'm just not good at this, maybe I'm not called to ministry, because every voice at the time, in the 1990s especially, was saying if it's healthy, it will grow, because all healthy things grow.

Karl Vaters: 32:20

Therefore, if it's not getting bigger, there must be something wrong. Figure out what's wrong. And I'm looking around going, but I don't see anything wrong here. So I must be blind or stupid or something. And I got to a point of real frustration that here I was pastoring what seemed to be a healthy church, but it mustn't be because it's not getting any bigger. It kind of it got somewhat bigger but then it kind of hit a plateau and I thought here I am, I'm pastoring one of these stuck churches, and I actually went to a pastoral counselor and through some time talking with him, he said something one day that just flipped the script for me. He said you got to figure out how to define success in ministry without numbers attached to it.

J.D. Pearring: 33:02

Brilliant.

Karl Vaters: 33:03

Yeah. And when he said that, I said I don't even know what that means. And he answered honestly he said yeah, I don't know what that means either, but if we don't figure it out together it's going to hurt you. And he was right. So since then I've been on this relentless pursuit of what does ministry look like? What does success in ministry look like without numbers attached to it? And out of that I started realizing hey, wait a minute. Okay, I haven't succeeded at building a big church, but we have succeeded.

Karl Vaters: 33:29

The Lord has helped us to build a really healthy small church, and maybe that's not a mistake, maybe that's strategic. And if we can understand the strategy of healthy small churches, then maybe we can start to leverage them in ways that we didn't. Because if we see small as a problem, we're going to approach it one way. If we see small as a strategy, we'll approach it a different way. And what I've discovered is, when you approach small churches strategically, you then can leverage the value of them much more effectively. And so out of that came the ministry of helping small churches thrive. What does it mean to be a healthy small church? What does it mean to use that strategically rather than trying to fix problems that aren't necessarily problems.

J.D. Pearring: 34:21

Wow, that's brilliant. In the church planting world that I've been involved in over 40 years, the churches that are multiplying and making the biggest impact tend not to be the megachurches. I mean, they've got to feed the beast, it's just, you know. They tend not to be the struggling to survive small churches. They tend to be kind of those in-between ones that understand multiplication and are just making a major difference that nobody sees, because you know we get to count the people who go to the church. You know across town or across the state or across the world that you help plant, but I'm really glad that you've done that. You wrote the Grasshopper Myth. That was your first book. That was the first book. Yeah, will you talk a little bit about these books? What was that about?

Karl Vaters: 35:24

Well, that was my story. I was going through all of this rethinking of church size and I was teaching it to our leadership. Hey, here's a way to do small strategically. We need to start thinking about doing this well instead of trying to get bigger. And as I kept discovering it and teaching it and we kept implementing it, my wife kept coming to me and going.

Karl Vaters: 35:43

You know, you keep complaining that nobody's written a book about this. You need to write the book. And at one point I said I'm not going to write a book. I'm a small church pastor. Nobody's ever heard of it, nobody's going to buy a book by me. And so she said well, who else is going to write a book about the value of small churches other than a small church pastor? And how many famous ones do you know? And I went okay.

Karl Vaters: 36:04

So I wrote the book out of my experiences, out of my frustrations and out of the things that I was learning. So the title the Grasshopper Myth comes from the story in the Bible where the 12 spies go into the promised land and 10 of them come back with a negative report, and part of that report includes the words. We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes and we looked the same to them. And so the premise of the book is and if you don't see a grasshopper in yourself, no one else will see a grasshopper in you. Just because your church is small doesn't mean you're a grasshopper. That's a myth, and we defeat that myth by going at it strategically rather than as a problem-fixing thing.

Karl Vaters: 36:39

So that was my story and I wrote it and I self-published it because I knew no publisher would take a risk on a pastor writing about a subject that nobody wants to read about and a writer that nobody had ever heard of. And against every odd, against every instinct that I had, it started selling like crazy the moment I printed it. Like a pastor would read it and buy a box of them to give to all of their pastor friends. It started happening within months after I put the thing out, again self-published, and I just kind of I started a blog to promote it. I put it on social media. I thought, okay, I'll put it out there, see if I can sell a few copies, and it just started buzzing like crazy and what I discovered was I was speaking to 90% of pastors in the world serving half of the body of Christ, and almost nobody was speaking into that space. So people were reading the Grasshopper myth and reading my story and going, oh, that's my story too.

J.D. Pearring: 37:39

Wow. So you started doing more speaking and traveling, and that's what you're doing now.

Karl Vaters: 37:49

Yeah, yeah, so well, I've written five books now. So I write books, I put out an article a week. I've got a podcast that comes out every two weeks called the Church Lobby, where I interview church leaders, just like you do, and I get constant invitations to go to different places to teach pastors. Sometimes it's a denomination that will bring me in for their annual meeting. Sometimes it's a local group of pastors that go. Hey, I'm getting something out of this guy's books or his podcast. Maybe we could bring him in and he could teach us for a couple days and see if we can understand small strategically. So yeah, I spent a lot of time on the road now, um, traveling around the country and now recently even around the world, because what I've discovered is, um, while big church principles can be helpful, they don't work everywhere, but strategic small church principles do work everywhere.

J.D. Pearring: 38:45

Well, I remember years ago attending a conference at a church and just seeing their children's area and the children's area was just so overwhelmingly amazing, thinking this just doesn't compute, this is not part of what you know. This does not help church planters. It may be expanding the vision.

Karl Vaters: 39:13

Yeah, I actually. Just three days ago I got a text from a friend who's in a small church and he said I'm at my annual denominational conference and the megachurch pastor who's speaking just gave a bunch of principles that he uses in his megachurch and then said and you can use these principles in any size church, just adapt it down to your size. And he texted me in the middle of the talk and said this is what he just said. Does that make any sense to you? And I said actually I understand that he believes that and I understand that he's really trying to be helpful. So I'm not putting him down.

Karl Vaters: 39:51

But no, when you go from small, especially to mega, it's not a matter of scale, it's a matter of type. The small church isn't just a smaller scale of the mega church, it's a different kind of church than the mega church, isn't just a smaller scale of the megachurch, it's a different kind of church than the megachurch, especially when it comes to pastoring and leading. And we don't take those differences into account as much as we should. So the small church pastor goes to the conference, hears from the megachurch pastor and goes it worked there, it'll work here. Let's just drop a couple zeros, and when they drop a couple zeros it still doesn't work. And then they think, man, either that speaker is wrong or I'm stupid because this isn't working here, and the good news is the speaker isn't wrong but you're not stupid. The megachurch principles, most of them, don't work in a small church context, because the small church is a different kind of church.

J.D. Pearring: 40:38

That's brilliant. Hey, in all honesty, Carl, I have not read any of your books. I think I've listened to a little bit of your podcast, been at a conference you've given. If you're saying, hey, here's the one book of my five that you should read, or start with what are you saying?

Karl Vaters: 41:02

Oh boy. Well, that depends where you are, because they're written for different audiences. So let me talk about the three that tend to be the most popular. Grasshopper myth is great if you are hearing what I'm saying now and going okay, I need to get a little more into this idea that small might be strategic. I'm feeling discouraged in my small church. I don't know how to switch gears to the small church mindset being strategic. The Grasshopper Myth can help a discouraged pastor become encouraged and start thinking differently. My second book, small Church Essentials, was written after I'd been doing this ministry for five years and it includes input from all of the travels and from going all around the country and around the world, and these are practical small church ideas that were proven to work everywhere I went. So when I started traveling, I had some ideas and I'd go, I'd present them in California and it would work, but I present them in.

Karl Vaters: 41:59

Arkansas, and it wouldn't work. Or I present them in America, and it worked, but I go to Croatia and it wouldn't work. So I tossed everything that didn't work in one place and I only kept the stuff that has worked every single place that we've gone. So that's small church essentials. So if you've gotten over that hump and you're going, okay, I get, the small church can be strategic. How do small and big churches operate differently? What are some small church specific strategies that I can start to implement? Those tools are in small church-specific strategies that I can start to implement. Those tools are in Small Church Essentials, which is my second book.

Karl Vaters: 42:28

And then, thirdly, if you're wondering, how did we get to this place that we are so obsessed with size? What happened was about three, four years ago. I've been doing all this work and I was spending all this time with small church pastors and quite often we'd leave a conference and my wife and I would look at each other and we'd talk about some of the conversations we had with discouraged pastors who were leaving encouraged from a conference, maybe for the first time in 20 years. Quite often, and we'd use the expression man, it feels like we pulled another body out of the river in this conference, and about three years ago, I started wondering hmm, we were pulling bodies out of the river, but what would happen if we went upstream and found out who's tossing the bodies in? Where did this obsession with becoming bigger come from? And so I started doing research into the church growth movement to discover how did we become obsessed with size and where has the problem come from. And so it's the most researched book that I've got. So it's the most researched book that I've got.

Karl Vaters: 43:24

So it's my most recent book it's been out just about a year called Desizing the Church, and it goes into the history of the church growth movement, which becomes the history of America, which goes into the history of the suburbs, which goes into the history of our obsession with celebrity, which goes into all kinds of different things and it uncovers here's why we're obsessed with size in the American church, here's what's happened as we've imported that obsession to the rest of the world. Here's why it's dangerous and here's a better solution. So if you aren't even a small church pastor, but you're looking around and going, getting bigger constantly isn't the answer. Where did we come up with this obsession? And what's a better way forward? Desizing the church is the best one for you. So, discouraged pastor, grasshopper myth wanting practical help for small churches, small church essentials, trying to figure out a better way forward than obsessing over numbers desizing the church.

J.D. Pearring: 44:20

Great. So now I got to get all three Great so now I got to get all three.

Karl Vaters: 44:36

That's what you're saying. Hey, give us a leadership tip. You've been sprinkling in a few. Just what's one leadership tip for leaders and maybe church planters? Two titles of two chapters of Desizing the Church, where I make the turn in the book towards with the problem, towards the solution. The first two chapter titles where I start to outline the solution are this Title number one is this Discipleship Fixes Everything.

Karl Vaters: 44:58

So pause for a moment and think about that. I wrote that. One of the things I love about writing is if you write something stupid, you don't have to hit publish and nobody has to know that you wrote something stupid. When you say something stupid, everybody knows it and it's really hard to pull it back. So I wrote down discipleship fixes everything and thought is that stupid or is that brilliant? And then I started thinking okay, can you imagine any problem in a church that discipleship won't fix? Think about it. Lack of finances, discipleship will fix that. Lack of unity Discipleship will fix that. Lack of maturity, discipleship will fix that. Bad theology Discipleship will fix that. Lack of evangelism Discipleship will fix that. Discipleship literally fixes every problem a church could have. It's almost like it was Jesus' idea, right. So that's my first piece of advice would be lean in on discipleship. Discipleship literally fixes everything, okay. Second one is this, and it's the next chapter title in the book, and it's integrity is the new competence.

Karl Vaters: 46:01

For 40 years, during the height of the church growth movement, and now it's in its waning years, we taught pastoral competence and we assumed that we were talking to people of integrity.

Karl Vaters: 46:14

But all you need to do is pay even a little bit of attention to the news coming out of the pastoral world in the last two or three years to see that there have been a whole bunch of pastoral leaders that we thought were men of integrity who were not.

Karl Vaters: 46:28

And I can give you the names, but I don't need to because you know the names. There are names in all of our heads right now that we think of with great sorrow right now, because they were not people of integrity. And here's the deal We've been teaching competence for 40 years and assuming integrity, and now it's time to get back, to stop assuming integrity and let's start teaching integrity and let's start living with integrity, because people who are leaving the church today are not leaving because of our lack of technical excellence. If people are leaving the church today. They are leaving because of our lack of integrity, and if they're not leaving because of our lack of technical excellence, we won't gain them back with more technical excellence, because that's not why they're leaving. They're leaving because of our lack of integrity and they'll only come back when we prove that we are people of integrity again.

J.D. Pearring: 47:16

Brilliant, brilliant, great stuff. Hey, thank you. Thanks for what you're doing. You have a podcast as well, the Church Lobby. Thanks for what you're doing. You have a podcast as well, the Church Lobby.

Karl Vaters: 47:26

Yep Conversations on faith and ministry. So every two weeks it comes out. We put it out on Thursdays every two weeks. Different conversations with different church leaders, usually small church specific, but some of them just more church leadership in general.

J.D. Pearring: 47:40

Great, great, great. Hey, thanks so much for being with us, really appreciate it.

Karl Vaters: 47:44

You're very welcome.

Announcer: 47:47

Thanks for joining the Leading Conversations podcast. We hope that you found it both helpful and encouraging. At Excel Leadership Network, our focus is on the church planter rather than the church. If you'd like to find out more about us, visit our webpage at excelnetwork. org. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss any future episodes. See you next time with another leading conversation.