Announcer: 0:06

Welcome to the Leading Conversations Podcast, sponsored by the Excel Leadership Network. On each episode, JD Pairing 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 episode of Leading Conversations with Excel Leadership Network. Today we're thrilled, we're excited. We are just uh so happy to have the stupendous Sean Morgan with us from the Ascent Network. Sean, thanks for being here.

SeanMorgan: 0:44

Hey, what an unbelievable introduction. I'm not worthy of that, but I'll take what I can get. So, yes, JD, thanks for having me. Good.

J.D.Pearring: 0:52

My introductions are not believable, but uh I believe it myself. So you're in Davis, California right now. What's great about Davis?

SeanMorgan: 1:05

Well, if you like riding bikes and um depending on the type of running you like to do, it is about the flattest city in the USA. I mean, there's there's not 10 feet of vert in this entire city. So it's a good place to ride a bike. You don't have to get all sweaty.

J.D.Pearring: 1:23

That's it. That's all you got. Actually, if you go to Davis, all you see is bikes.

SeanMorgan: 1:30

Yeah, it's there's something I I once heard, I mean, the city says they invented the bike lane. I I don't know how you prove that, but I did hear that there are more bikes per capita in the city of Davis than anywhere else in America.

J.D.Pearring: 1:44

Wow. And you've got a master's from UC Davis.

SeanMorgan: 1:49

Yeah, yeah, I did. I got an MBA here back in uh back in the 90s, actually, right after I graduated undergrad. That's a funny story, actually, because I I uh I went you and I were talking about Colorado Springs. I went to the Air Force Academy and I am living proof that a very average student can make it into the Air Force Academy, including my test scores, my ACT and SAT scores were atrocious. And one, I don't know, like I'm I'm rarely the smartest person in the room. I have learned I connect the dots on things quickly, but um, I didn't have the attention span to complete those tests. And I had atrocious scores. But randomly, my senior year of the Air Force Academy, they did a thing where they said the Air Force will pay for you to take the GMAT, which is this the test you take in college if you want to go into an MBA program. I don't even know what it stands for. And so I was I was thinking about it, and they said, Oh, by the way, you get out of a day of class, you get excused from a day of class to go take like a four-hour exam. And I thought, oh, sign me up. So I they paid for it, whatever it was, $150 fee back then. And I went and took it. And I I just took it. I didn't think about it, I didn't stress about it. But when I got my scores back, they were the best test scores I've ever got in my life. I was something like 95th percentile on it, and it was it qualified me to get my master's degree, really from anywhere in the country, as long as they didn't look at my the rest of my grades. And so uh two years later, the Air Force moved me out to Northern California and I took a look at the school. The business school was a top 20 business school, and I thought my test scores are gonna expire. And if I ever got to take that test again, they will be back into the atrocious category. So I'm diving into school and gonna knock this out.

J.D.Pearring: 3:39

So, did you go there as part of part of your Air Force tours? I mean, was that well?

SeanMorgan: 3:44

I was at Travis Air Force Base, which is Northern California, kind of wedged in between San Francisco and Sacramento. And so I was just moments away, just 20 minutes away from UC Davis. So they have a uh what they call at the time a working professional program where you can do night school and occasional weekend school, but you don't have to quit your day job. And so that's how I did that.

J.D.Pearring: 4:10

Wow. Well, great. Well, congratulations to you on on a UC Davis MBA. That's that's a it's a great accomplishment. Hey, let's back up. Talk about being a kid uh growing up and how did you come to Christ?

SeanMorgan: 4:27

Yeah, well, there's two parts to that story. I grew up in a Christian home, and my parents, without a lot of financial resources, found a way to put us into Christian school. So I had a very church environment growing up, but I never really took it seriously. There were moments maybe, um, but I never really changed my life around. I would say I was probably pretty lukewarm through my my teenage years. And um I saw things, I think, as probably really both my kids are are going through similar things right now, where I saw things in the church that made me not like the church. And I had this thing in the back of my mind going, why I believe God is who he says he is and Jesus is who he says he is. But why would he want such an ugly bride? And so that was enough for me. There were three three key things to that we can talk about if you want, but um, that was enough for me just to go, yeah. I'm just gonna hit pause on church engagement.

J.D.Pearring: 5:36

Talk about those three things that uh pushed you away.

SeanMorgan: 5:40

Yeah, well, the first one was um a good friend of mine. Um, her mom had a was on staff at a church, went through a divorce, and the church um didn't take care of her well during the divorce. I don't know the details of the divorce, but uh went through a divorce that was really hard on her and the family, and the church really didn't take care of her well and ultimately asked her to step down from her job. And I just the first thing I was like, why would the church abandon somebody in probably the roughest season of their life? So that was number one now, and this is somewhat judgmental, I didn't know all the details of either side, but um, the second thing was there there was an elder at our church that was involved in a murder. And um, I thought, oh, and this was somebody who like I didn't know this person, and I don't think they were friends with our family, but it was a small enough church of just maybe well, it was pretty it was growing fast, but it was probably under a thousand at the time. And so when you go to church every week, you a church that size, you tend to recognize people, and so I was like, I knew this person, I had sat next to this person, I'd sat behind this person, and I thought, whoa, what is going on? This guy was a leader in our church. And then the third thing that happened was uh in early years of college, I had a friend that just got in a lot of trouble, and we were both part of a college youth group, and there was a member of the college youth group on the leadership side who was a volunteer um leader who was fairly high up in rank in the military. And when my friend got in trouble, and the trouble was all his fault, 100% his fault, but he he got to rock bottom sort of in that, and he pleaded with this leader of this youth group. He said, Would you be a character reference for me? And the guy said, No. And I just thought, man, you've had influence, spiritual influence over this young kid for a couple of years, maybe a year and a half. Um, and you've said nothing. You you've invested nothing extra in this person. And he's obviously in this category of I wouldn't be a character reference for you, which I can I can actually understand that. I have no problem with that. The problem that I have is that you never did anything prior to this moment to help this person get back, get their life on track. Um, you just let them sit and be in the crowd and those types of things. And so that was enough for me at that point to to just go. Um, again, it wasn't a crisis of faith, but it was where I was just like, I think I'm done with organized religion.

J.D.Pearring: 8:18

Wow. So then you're uh you're kind of walking away, and then what happened?

SeanMorgan: 8:26

So that was uh that was while I was at the Air Force Academy. And um, you know, some of that, if I look back at some of that was was me just um giving myself permission to, you know, probably I I wasn't like really into alcohol or like womenizing or anything like that. But there was a little bit of that wild side of me that when I finally said, I'm just gonna hit the pause button on church or I'm just gonna push that away at arm's distance, it did give me a little more freedom to make some bad choices. Um and so that that to me, like I was solving a little bit of a tension in my spirit, right? The Holy Spirit, part of the job of the Holy Spirit is to convict the lost. And um, so I did sort of push that away a little bit. Um, but yeah, then I sort of just drifted for a few years and I focused on my career, started my master's degree, you know, I was a very, very busy person. But then God, I just had a nudge a couple years later. And uh the nudge was God just said uh sort of fish or cut bait, sort of like like you you have to. Not a verbal, you know, God woke me up and spoke to me, but there was just a season where I was like God made it clear we're gonna continue to wrestle. Like the wrestling match, it will continue.

J.D.Pearring: 10:06

And uh so what I mean, obviously the conclusion of that is God won, right?

SeanMorgan: 10:11

Yeah, yeah. So that's that's the beginning of me getting into ministry. I was full-time in the Air Force at the time. And we my wife and I were dating, she was living in the Bay Area, but uh, she would come up and um we started like going through. You might remember what these are, some of your listeners probably don't, but there were these things called the yellow pages, and churches would take out ads in the yellow pages. So if you clicked the letter C for church, you would find different churches. And I didn't know it at the time, but I had grown up in a church plant in Colorado, and that church is still there, it's called Woodman Valley Chapel. And to me, when I was just a young kid, it was just a church, but um, it was a church plant, and there's something significant about the focus mission of a church plant. Mission, you will not exist next year if you do not reach people and disciple people. Um, whereas established churches oftentimes think the opposite. We won't exist next year unless we keep our donors happy. So there was something pure about church plans and um we went to two amazing churches that are both there, um, significant ministries in the East Bay, and um we just fell in love with the culture of this kind of come as you are um side of this church plant that was called New Life Church, meeting in an elementary school gymnasium gymnasium in Fairfield, California.

J.D.Pearring: 12:08

Okay, hey, uh you cut out um oh no, yeah, I and I don't know if that was me or if that was you, but uh when you started talking about Woodman Valley Chapel, I mean I know I know that church was there before we started ours. Um if you could I and our editors will pick this up, if you could pick it up right after you were talking about Woodman Valley Chapel, and I don't froze up like three times.

SeanMorgan: 12:41

Okay, sorry. Yeah, I don't know. It could be mine. I have really fast internet, but it does occasionally it works great sometimes, it's really fast, and then at other times it's not. So yeah, let me jump back in there. I'll just give a little pause for the editors to clip in and so when I grew up back in Colorado, I was part of a church plant. Now, as a young kid, I didn't really know it was a church plant, it was just church to me when you're in elementary school, but uh, it's a significant ministry. It's called Woodman Valley Chapel. And there's something beautiful about the mission of a church plant because churches, as they age, and they don't even have to be old, old. They just have to be probably five to seven years old, and they start to have insiders. They start to have what I call the church establishment. And insiders tend to feel like, well, it's my tithe, paying the bills, and I sit around the committee rooms and get my vote, and I want to create this ministry to serve my needs and those of my family.

J.D.Pearring: 13:45

And we're focused. Yeah.

SeanMorgan: 13:47

Yep. And a church plant doesn't have that. They they there are no insiders. In fact, they have a distinct awareness that we must reach people in order to exist next week, next month, next year. And that's a very beautiful thing. I think that's the heart. I think every established church needs to have relationships with church plants because they need that repollination of that spirit if they don't have it. And um, that's a whole probably a whole nother podcast. But when we landed in Northern California and began looking for churches, without consciously realizing it, we were attracted to the idea of a church plant. And we attended and sort of sized up a few church plants, but felt led to a church called New Life Church in Northern California, in Fairfield, California, which was in the process of um doing a beautiful thing that was painful, but nonetheless beautiful, was shutting down a dying church, selling off its assets in order to replant in a more relevant way to reach the community. And we got to be a part of that, and that became our church. And as that church grew quickly from nothing to about a thousand people, I received a call to to ministry through the pastor and elders there in old. How did that work?

J.D.Pearring: 15:09

How did the call to ministry work for you?

SeanMorgan: 15:13

Well, um we moved away. The Air Force actually moved us away for 12 months, and um we we inherited a small amount of money, very, very small amount of money. But you know, we were in our 20s, mid-20s at the time. And we just said, let's let's take a full tithe of this and send it back, like regardless of whatever we do with this money here in our local church where we're living in Texas at the time, let's send a tithe back to the church in California. Because again, we were in love with the mission they were on and the culture they had created. And um I think that was a significant thing. I mean, if you think about it as a pastor, you don't have a 20, you don't have very many 26-year-olds that write you a decent sized check when they don't even live in your town. Um, and so I think that um when we got back, when we moved back, which we knew we were coming back um after that year away, the the pastor just asked me to be more involved in ministry. And um, so um this is there's a great leadership principle here. Um, one of them is that um you you shouldn't be enamored with people, certain, certainly shouldn't be enamored with um people who are giving, but it might cue you to other things God is doing in their heart as a leader. And so I always tell leaders don't ever ask for volunteers, not for key positions. Look and see what God is doing and try to read where God has shown you that He is beginning to call and equip somebody into leadership. And it may just be leading a lay leadership initiative. And so the next thing that happened was we went through Saddleback's 40 days of community. They had a 40 days of purpose type thing, but they did a 40 days of community, which is an emphasis on small groups. And at the time we had seven regular small groups, and I think um I used to know the number, but at the end of a six-week initiative that I led as a lay leader, so the pastor invited me to oversee that. We had about 70 small groups in the church in uh after six weeks, from from about six or seven to about 70. And so I think that was he he was seeing something, and then he was allowing me to opt in, and then he was reassessing like, is this person um gonna work hard? Are people gonna take cues from this person and follow this young, you know, young guy's leadership? And so it there was that, and then I um I led a capital campaign as a lay leader that we we hit our goal successfully. And then it was at that point that the pastor, uh, the actual conversation, um, he asked me out to lunch and I was like, sure, let's go out to lunch. Um, it might have been the first time we had gone out to lunch, first or second time. I had no idea what lunch was about. He did. He had been praying, he had been working with the elders, and so I just went out to lunch. It was at Chevy's Mexican restaurant in in Fairfield, California. I don't even know if it's still there. Of course.

J.D.Pearring: 18:26

I think I've been there. Yeah. We used to drive from Venetia.

SeanMorgan: 18:32

Yeah, and um I loved it, loved the food. So I went to lunch and he just said, I think God's telling me that I want to that I need to invite you in to ministry to come lead alongside me. And he basically said, Look, I'm I'm a visionary, I'm a creative, uh, obviously theologian, but I'm not a very good manager, operational leader. I don't dot I's and toss cross T's. I don't follow up well. And he goes, Um, I'm becoming the lid of the church because I'm trying to do things, I'm I'm I'm sacrificing what I'm really good at to try to do things that I'm not very good at because I'm trying to prove myself as this like utilitarian pastor that can do it all and lead the church. But he goes, if I'm really honest with myself, I need somebody to lead with me. And um I need to stick to the things that I'm best at, and I need a partner who I trust, who I think God's called. And he said, I think that person's you. And um what's funny is I laughed. I was like, in my head, I was like, this was coming out of left field quite a bit. And I remember thinking, um, there's a there's a verse, I think it's Jeremiah 29, 11, that says, For I know the plans you have for me, declares the Lord. Um, or no, I for I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans to prosper and not to harm you. So God has plans for for you, but what I felt in that moment was not that. Well, this is what I felt in that moment. I have plans for me. And I don't want your invitation to ministry to get into my plans for me. Um kind of sounds self-centered, and it was. So I walked away from that meeting thinking this guy's crazy. But you remember how I talked about God nudging me back into understanding and seeing the church differently from me just kind of walking away, going the ugly bride to um, there's you know, Gomer, Gomer was pretty ugly. Um, her behavior certainly was. But God said, no, no, no, um, you're going to Hosea, you're gonna be in relationship with this person because you're going, I'm going to show through you what my love is like for Israel. And I just remember thinking the church isn't a place where you um clean your fish before you catch them um thing here. Like it's it's it's a messy place, and I need to find beauty in that, not on the surface, my assessment of judgmentalism or um hip hypocrite, uh hypocritical critical behavior. And so as I was sitting through that, I had those spiritual nudges back then, and then I began to get those spiritual nudges. So, long story short is it took me 12 months. But at the end of 12 months, I once again had a moment where God just literally told me about 10 o'clock one night, not verbally, but I just felt this pressure within me. And God was like, We are we're gonna finish this conversation before you go to bed. And and um, I went on a long walk, uh, probably didn't go to bed until about 5 a.m., if at all. Um, and at the end of that, it was about 3 a.m. I was on a beach in Pacifica, just walking up and down the beach, and the clouds broke open and the moon was was out that night. And I just remember surrendering, just saying, God, I'm willing to trust you in every way. I'm going to say yes to this. And then I remember looking up and seeing the moon kind of come through a little opening in the clouds. And I just felt God smile and I sensed a peace. I thought at the time I was saying yes to a year or two of ministry to come in. I had this list of like these are the things that I could do to help the organization of the church, the staff. Um, that was extremely naive. I was on staff for eight and a half years. It took me eight and a half years to do what I thought I could do in one or two. So um, but then God uh didn't release me from my calling, but changed my assignment from a local church to serving multiple local churches. And I've been doing that ever since, too. So been a long run.

J.D.Pearring: 23:02

Wow. So what are you doing? What are you doing now? This is great. I love the I love the picture of the moon coming through. I think most of us are going, man, that would have been great. Uh, but most of us are not walking on the beach of Pacifica at 3 a.m. But that that's just a cool story. So, but uh so what are you doing now?

SeanMorgan: 23:26

Yeah, so the the calling to serve uh professionally to you know full time um has remained clear, but the assignment has changed. And I felt like God was saying, I want you to work more for the big C church. Like I've given you, remember, I said earlier I I'm rarely the smartest person in the room, but I can often connect the dots quickly. And I felt like God was saying, you're somebody who can work with pastors and tell them the honest truth in a way that's encouraging. Assess things um from a discerning um manner quickly, you can really help people um re-examine their situations and uh maybe chart a better time it came in 2011 and 2012 for me. And um, I didn't know what that meant, so there was some experimenting for a few years, but I started an organization called the Ascent Leader. And what we do is leadership development for pastors in cohorts, which are relational circles, typically in a living room or a backyard kind of fireplace environment, um, where we leave the boardroom behind. And that comes with pretentiousness, positions, politics, strategic plans, et cetera, et cetera. And the living room environment is always more relational and connectional and honest and pure. Um, and so we we seek to create those kinds of environments in groups that are less than 10 people, usually six to nine people. And we navigate heavy aspects of leadership. A lot of leadership people can handle on their own. You know, they're they're they're doing it day to day. But there are certain aspects where you just need some people in your corner, some people that you trust, some people that know you and are willing to speak into your life and your leadership and be there for you. And even when you don't need them, putting your head on your bed pillow every night, knowing you have a few people like that in your corner is priceless. So we create communities. We have probably 15 to 17 cohorts of pastors right now that we serve.

J.D.Pearring: 25:52

And they they uh are not like short-term, correct?

SeanMorgan: 25:56

Well, the commitment is for a year, but they're like small groups in a church. You know, you want people to make a commitment, but you also can't hold them in perpetuity. So we find that about 80% of the people that sign up want to keep coming back.

J.D.Pearring: 26:15

What's your longest running cohort?

SeanMorgan: 26:17

Nine and a half years.

J.D.Pearring: 26:19

Nine and a half years. Are you in that? Are you leading that?

SeanMorgan: 26:23

It's one that I lead, yeah. Not because I'm great at and they keep coming around for me. In fact, those guys joke around when I show up at a cohort. We get together every six months and they kind of look at me going, What are you doing here? Because it really is them. The value is them. We we get access to great leaders that we call mentors that typically we fly to their city, they open up their home, we we get to meet in their home, meet their families and the and their spouses and learn from them and sort of the behind the scenes side of life and leadership, stories they cannot tell in a keynote, um, often with tears associated with it. It's incredible. But at the end of the day, as great as all our mentors are, and they're all A plus, what keeps the nine and a half year groups, the seven-year groups, the six and a half year groups, etc., coming back is not those things which are great, it's what happens with the peer-to-peer.

J.D.Pearring: 27:22

Sure, sure. That's just so important in uh in ministry. The key is the relationships. It's uh, you know, Paul had the vision. I don't know if he was on Pacifica, in Pacifica on the way to Damascus, and then he had this God speaking, and it was, I mean, that's amazing, but the miracle didn't happen until Ananias came and showed up and put his hands on him. That's right. So I I think we were pretty uh uh what similar uh symbiotico and doing that sort of stuff. The whole I love the cohort idea. Interesting, the long term, that's uh that's kind of amazing. Some of our coaching is just more short-term um outcome based right now, but I I love that I love that idea. Um, hey, you've done this. Give us a give us a few leadership tips. I usually just ask for one, but you are the smartest guy in the room right now.

SeanMorgan: 28:27

Oh my gosh. Yeah, because I'm the only one.

J.D.Pearring: 28:32

You're the smartest guy on the zoom. Uh give us a few tidbits of what you've picked up over the over the years.

SeanMorgan: 28:42

Yeah, well, it's interesting. I'm actually I felt prompted to write a book. Um, and I thought I was gonna start writing it next summer. And recently I I felt God sort of telling me, no, no, no, no, no, no. I didn't say start writing it next summer. I I said I want it done by next summer. So I'm like, oh wow, I've got like nine months now to get this this book written. So I've been working on an outline, and um I'll give you one of the ideas. And and plea, this is not like you know, I'm running around. I I am literally running around taking notes from some of the greatest leaders on planet earth. Um, but um as I do that, you know, that's a position that I I don't feel worthy of. Um, but I I am learning from them and condensing this down by by God's grace. I don't feel like I'm equipped for writing a leadership book, but it's an amalgam of the 31 years I spent in the US military as a pilot for combat tours and um and and then ministry, local church ministry for just under a decade, and then now nearly 15 years coaching. Um so one of the things that I I have seen over and over. Again, and I think it's plaguing leaders now more than ever. Um I just listened to a good friend's sermon uh l to yesterday, his his sermon from um a recent Sunday, and I I listened to it yesterday, and the title was really an audience of one. And how when you when you really focus on what God wants from you, you're not out there trying to people please. And when you get high praise from people, it doesn't inflate you because you're grounded, and when you get ruthless below the belt critiques from people, it doesn't destroy you because God insulates you. You have an audience of one. And I loved that sermon because a chapter in my book is helping leaders navigate current problems in a way that solves long-term problems. And what I say in here is I say A-level leaders look at the current problem and they understand the root of the problem and they go after that, which is a more painful way of solving the current problem than what B-level leaders do, which is they they try to make the pain of the current problem go away. Another way would to describe it would almost be like sweeping things under the rug. And so it's a people-pleasing side of them, oftentimes, that they just want to deal with this problem in a way where the pain goes away. If you say it's a hot potato in their lap, they just want it to cool off a little bit and then they move on. But the problem with that path is although it is quicker and easier today, in the long run, it will rear its head again and again, maybe even in the same form or even in different forms that are hard to recognize. But A-level leaders recognize there is a root cause to this. Something, maybe this is what the behavior looks like, but it's because in our culture, we've allowed that type of behavior to flourish in other ways. So we're not just going to create a rule to extinguish this behavior or outlaw this behavior. We're going to go after what is it that in our systems, in our culture, in our behavior, in the in our paradigms that we need to go after so that this problem does not come up again. And that is the difference, one of the key differences between top-level leaders, A-level leaders, and B level leaders is A-level leaders will solve problems in a more permanent way, going after root causes. B level leaders will solve them in ways that make the pain go away today. And so I say that not to say that all the A-level leaders I know always do this and never do this, and B level leaders are always doing it wrong. We're all drawn into situations where we make mistakes continuously. And sometimes A-level leaders are making those mistakes, and sometimes B level leaders might be going after root cause. So the encouragement is for leaders to really understand when there is a problem that they need to pause and understand the root of that problem. And then they need to know is this something that's a one-off that we just need to deal with because it is truly not a part of our systems and our culture and our people? Or this is worth pausing and stopping and going after. An example would be I had a lead pastor who changed the way they did communion on a Sunday morning. I think they used to pass the something around and they did it in tables where everyone had to get up and basically they were trying to get two minutes out of their service. And so they were like, well, it takes seven minutes to do communion. We could get it down to five if we did it a different way. And it sort of backfired. Like it wasn't, it was the first time they did it. It wasn't well really well organized. Not to say it was a bad idea, it just wasn't executed very well. But the elders of the church, it was a fairly big church, they got really upset and they started having side meetings about the problem and um made conclusions and then went to the lead pastor later. And the lead pastor was smart enough to say, hey, I'm willing to do whatever you want to do with communion. If we just need to go back to the way it was, that's fine. But now we have a bigger problem is that the way that our elder team solves problems cannot be this dysfunctional. We cannot be having side meetings and trying to make decisions and gather information and make conclusions about things unless we're doing it with a spirit of unity and and with a um like practical steps that bring unity, not just with a spirit. And so I love that situation because the problem easily could have been dealt with, which is okay, yeah, you're right. We're just gonna go back and do communion the old way. But what he did was made the elders stronger. And when they encounter bigger problems or more divisive things in the future, now they have a spirit of oneness that is ratcheted up a notch from where they were before because of how that problem was handled. It was much more problem or what much more difficult and painful for everyone to really pause and go, yeah, our behavior is the bigger issue.

J.D.Pearring: 35:36

Well, great. So the leadership tip is don't change communion. No that's a really great idea. Instead of just saying, Hey, you guys are out of lunch, let's just go, or we'll just go back and sweep it under the rug. Rug. Excellent. Hey, what's next for Sean Morgan?

SeanMorgan: 35:54

Well, we our model, we we make changes to our model. Um, we serve three types of leaders right now. We started out serving essentially leaders who were incoming leaders in a succession. So the younger leader involved in a lead pastor succession. But over time, as those leaders kept coming back, they would say to us, I need this for my second chair leader, my executive pastor. Could you do executive pastor groups? So that started happening. And the other way to become a lead pastor, as we've already talked about, and is something that has really drawn you and I together, is you plant. So you can follow someone before you or you can plant. And many of these churches that we were serving were prioritizing church planting in their missions and outreach strategy. So they're working to raise up planters from within their own church and they're looking to have financial resources to help launch these church plants, but they did not feel good about writing really large checks to church planters and then just sort of hoping for the best. And so they said, hey, they're they're networked well with other church planting groups. Um, and they're they're getting some assessments and some training and some equipping and some project managing in terms of how to plant. But they came to me, these leaders came to me and said, but once they plant and they are now the lead pastor of a local church, we want them to have a cohort with other leaders like them who can be that essential brotherhood for them of support that we have as succession lead pastors. And so I think those are the three buckets that we've been focused on now for three years. But we are experiencing a ton of momentum, particularly with our church planter work. And so that's going to get a lot of time and energy from me in the coming year is developing our scholarship fund so that we can scholarship these church planters and get them placed. So money isn't an obstacle in the early years of our support for them. So it really takes a village, right? Um, and that's a great metaphor. Um, you don't want to do anything in leadership alone, in my opinion. It's lonely enough. So uh it's a beautiful place to be to have your current clients begin to be that village of support to help you develop something new with the church planning front.

J.D.Pearring: 38:24

That's wonderful. That sounds great. Well, I'm hoping we can partner uh on some stuff going forward because uh I think we have similar hearts, even though you are the the smarter guy in the room. But I I think uh I I would love to see us doing some stuff together. I really appreciate what you're doing. I've heard good things, I know a lot of your mentors, and uh I I just am looking forward to God continue to to use you and to nudge you. And thanks for answering the call.

SeanMorgan: 38:53

Absolutely. Thanks for having me on, and it's great to get to know you and what you do, JD, uh, which is absolutely inspiring. I'm on your email list, I get your updates and uh am blown away that by your impact. I mean, even just recently I saw a letter and I would I couldn't even count the number of church plants that were in the works, but I started looking at just even like in Havana, Cuba. And I was like, there's like, I don't know, I just started counting those. I was like, there's like four just in that one city, and so absolutely inspiring.

J.D.Pearring: 39:25

God, yeah, God is working. It's just fun to be in on what he's doing. So cool. Well, hey, thanks so much for your time today.

SeanMorgan: 39:32

Yep, thanks, thanks for having me on.

Announcer: 39:39

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.