Transcription
[Applause] Good morning everybody. Okay, good morning everybody. Turn to the person next to you and say, "Looks like you've lost a little weight." Come on, tell him, tell him, tell him. Just start off with some good news. And how many y'all just lied? Now, don't raise your hand. I don't know that that's my favorite thing to hear somebody tell me. It's never true, but I love hearing it. In fact, I set a goal this year to lose 20 pounds. I thought I could lose 20 pounds over the course of the whole year, and I'm happy to report, halfway through the year, got 30 pounds to go. Come on, somebody! Where y'all at? So I'm really close. Y'all keep praying for me.
It's good to see you guys again. I'm delighted to be here. I do want to get to work this morning. Last night, I'll try to minister to you today. I want to teach you and share with you some things that I'm very, very passionate about. My calling in life, I love pastoring our church, but I really don't feel called to preach. I really only feel called to pastor our church, just our church. I love our church. I plan to be there the rest of my life. But, um, but I love helping other churches grow. That's just, I can't explain it. I've always had a passion, uh, for leaders and for church leaders, and just anything I could ever do to serve you, I will do it. I mean that with all my heart.
We have, uh, resources that currently a little over 17,000 churches are accessing, uh, just, uh, just the free stuff. And so you can go to the Church of Holland's website. There's a place there called Holland's Resources. And everything we produce, we upload it. And so from, from my employee handbook manual to small group leader training, to message notes, to whatever, if we produce it, we upload it and give it away. And so we'd love you to have that. And then I also have a ministry that's just called Grow Leader, that's growleader.com. We have a lot of things, roundtables, and a variety of ways to coach, serve, uh, pastors in any way. So if I can be a blessing to you, it would be the joy of my life.
And right now, I'm building a college as well down in Birmingham, Alabama. We call it Birmingham, Alabama, and, uh, and called Highlands College. I'm very, very excited about it. We're trying to build what we think is one of the first in the Christian space to be more like the academy models, like the Air Force Academy or the military academies. Actually taught a religion class at the Air Force Academy for a few years when I was a youth pastor in Colorado Springs, and, uh, and kind of fell in love with the model of the academies where academics is only one-fourth of the training. They have actually four pillars of training at the military academies, and it's the only university in America that 100% of the graduates go to the degree field. So they all, they all go in the military. And, and the hope is to build a Christian college just for full-time ministers, and 100% of them get placed in full-time ministry. So y'all believe God with me about that, uh, vision? Yeah. Jesus name. And we're excited about it, and God's moving already in it. And so it's just so much fun.
And today, what I want to do is I want to share with you what I teach at an annual conference that I do that I can't advertise. It fills up. We, we open up registration for this July conference in November every year. It's almost nine months ahead, and before noon of the day, it fills up. And so I can't invite you to attend, but I'll give you a lot of things that take place at this conference.
The origin of it was, I was in 21 days of prayer and fasting. A lot of things happened to me while I'm praying and fasting. And I was in 2011 at the January 21 days of prayer and fasting. And we have thousands of people come at 6 a.m. We have to have traffic, you know, to bring people in and out at, you know, at 5:30 in the morning for these prayer times in January, in the dead of winter. And people are fasting and praying. And I, and I, I just turn people loose to to pray. And we just have corporate prayer for the last 15 minutes. But I just, I'm a pacer when I pray. So I'm just pacing back and forth across the front. And normally don't go into any of these prayer times with any agenda, knowing that God has a better agenda than I do. You might want to write that down. I mean, like, sometimes I think we go into a prayer with our agenda, when really, if you'll just listen, God has something he wants to say to you. And I think sometimes our agendas take up all the prayer time when God has a better one for you. Come on, say amen right there. That's really true.
And that's when I heard God say, "Help a thousand churches under a thousand." Break that number. And again, I don't think that's a magical number, a thousand. I'm a numbers guy. I, I was an accounting major when I got called to ministry, and I'm really good with numbers and money and things like that. And so I just know that's how God was speaking to me that day. And so I shared it with my team. I had this, I think God said this to me, and I, and I'm not the man of faith and power that people think I am. I'm a more paced and prayerful, but anyway, I, uh, I said, "I don't know if I heard God or not, but let's try it."
And, uh, in 2011, we sent out one. They, they've created a tweet. In fact, I was back when you could only have like 144 characters, and they created a tweet that basically said, "This is going to be not really like a conference conference. This is going to be a backstage pass place. There's no guest speakers, there are no vendors, there's nobody in the foyers. Um, we're not selling anything, we're giving it all away. And, and you can go anywhere. So you can go in the drum cage, you can get in the sound booth. We want to teach you. We'll tell you where we bought stuff, how we got it, how we did it. It's, it's basically a playbook and a recipe kind of conference. We'll just give you basically what we did, how we did it."
And then we, we had an idea that, uh, there was a model that is not that we didn't own, that we feel like was the God, a God model. And, and I, and I make this case at the conference, how God has always wanted these certain things for his people in his church. And, and if you can follow this model, and you can customize it, of course, to your own culture and context, but if you'll follow basically this plan, that it'll help your church grow. And so if you want to come.
And so 400 pastors came to the very first one. And I, and I, I said, "Look, we're going to give you a recipe, so to speak. We're going to give you a playbook. And if some of you are willing to try it, we'd like to know if it worked or not, because we won't have another conference if it didn't." And I was serious about that. Like, I'm not going to keep repeating something that doesn't work, you know? So I didn't know if it was just unique to us. I thought it was universal and scalable, meaning I thought it would work everywhere at any size. I thought.
And so 200 of the 400 pastors and churches agreed to do it and allowed us to track their success. And most were seeing two and three hundred percent growth their first year. Uh, the one that grew the least grew 30% that year. And so these were just things that that worked. So since then, we, we just, I've been having more fun than you can imagine helping churches reach their growth potential.
And, and it, it begins with three truths that I don't know if you agree with or not, but I'm going to give them to you. I believe them. And I think if you're going to be successful in what I'm going to share with you, you have to believe them. And I'll just give them to you. And that is, I believe it is God's will for our churches to grow. I just believe it is. And I know there are a lot of people out there, "Oh man, you're just all about the numbers. You're just, you're just..." Yes, I'm unapologetically about more people going to heaven than going to hell. Yes, absolutely. And you, because you count what matters. And people matter to God. Everybody, people matter to God. And I know the church has gotten into it in the form of ego and things that turned a lot of people off. I get that. And we don't, we don't grow so we can draw better cars and and have have more followers on Instagram. We grow because heaven and hell are realities. People actually go there. And I always say, growth is not an option as long as heaven and hell are real places. And they are. And people matter to God. Can I get a good amen out there, everybody?
So if you believe that, I believe it is God's will for my church to grow. I want you to say it out loud. Here we go. "I believe it is God's will." From it is. I'm just telling you, go read Luke 15. Jesus gave three parables that said, "I care about the lost." In fact, I am distracted by that which is lost. I will leave all the found things that I have to go look for those lost things. He is passionate about lost things. And you are too, by the way. If you ever lose something of value to you, you don't count what you have when you can't find your cell phone. You don't go, "Well, there's my couch." You don't do that. You are distracted by that which is lost. You can't live until you find the thing that's lost. And you need to know that while God loves us, he's not looking at us right now as much as you think he is. He takes a peek at this conference. "Oh, there's my people." And his eyes go right back to, "Where's my lost kids? Where are they at? Where are they?" He's looking for his lost kids. And we need to get on mission and do the same.
I really believe that. The second thing is, is that I believe that that every church's growth potential, in my growth, that we all have different growth potential. And I shared this a little bit last night. That's why we have to get out of the culture of comparison, because we've all been given different assignments and different gifts. But listen to me, God does care not just about faithfulness, he cares about fruitfulness. If you don't believe that, go read Matthew 25, okay? And he didn't reward the faithful one who brought the one he gave, who came back with the one. The one who had the one was given the one and came back with the one. The Bible says there was weeping and gnashing of teeth. Come on, everybody. Right. I do not know why there's a G in that word. I have no idea. Because God was looking that whatever you were given, that you multiplied it. And notice that the one who was given two and turned it into four had the same reward as the one who was given five and turned it into ten. So God's just looking for fruitfulness for what you have been given. Don't look over your shoulder. Look at everybody else. Only respond to what God has called you to do.
Here's the last thing. I believe, by the way, if you believe that one, if you believe that my growth potential is different from yours, say that one out loud with me. Here we go. "I believe that my." So I'm just going to stay faithful to my assignment, my portion, my calling, what God's given me to do. The third is, is that I believe I can get better. Yeah, I just think I can get better. I think things can get better. And so to me, I'm just going to be very honest with you, my favorite part of ministry is growing. I love the fact that I come to the conference, I've already taken at least five different ideas from the conference and I haven't even been here 24 hours yet that I'm bringing home to my team. I've already emailed two people of songs, things that I've seen that I want to bring back. Because why? Because I can get better. And if you don't believe you can get better, you'll become a critic of those who are. And God didn't call us to be critics, he called us to be disciples. Grow, learn, get better. And it's loads of fun. So if you believe you can get better, say it with me. "I believe I can get." Yeah, we can all get better.
So I want to encourage you in that and stop making excuses. I hear this all the time because we help so many churches, you know, like, "Well, the devil's different in my town than yours." No, he's not. My city, my town, my people want all, you know, they make, they make excuses. So in the spirit of Connor asking me to tell you a Boudreaux joke, I'll tell you a Boudreaux joke about excuses. All right, because I know y'all want another one. You heard yes or no? You did. Yeah. All right. So Boudreaux was swerving in his car and just, and the police put him over and said, "Boudreaux, he said, um, you're going to have to get out of the car and do a breathalyzer." He says, "You can't do that." He says, "Why not?" He says, "I'm asthmatic. I would die right here on the highway." He said, "I said, well, then we'll bring you into the police station and do a blood test." He said, "She can't do that." He said, "Why not?" He says, "I'm a hemophiliac. I would bleed to death." When the police said, "Well, that's all right then. You have to walk their straight line." Says the king, "Did that?" He says, "Why not?" This is because I'm drunk. But all right, here we go. We'll stop making excuses. Here we go.
All right, so I need two and a half days, but let me give it to you in about 20 minutes, okay? Um, the outline of basically what you need to think through in the form of questions. So there are five questions. I know this, that if you answer them correctly, and I'll help you a little bit because I don't have a lot of time, but there are five questions that if you answer them correctly, I promise you, you're on the pathway to growth.
So here's the first sentence that is, we have to clarify, why do we exist? Like, what is the purpose of the church? And for you note-takers, I see a lot of you guys taking notes. Truly godly people take notes. Come on, everybody. Note-takers go to heaven. It's just great. All right. So let me give you another one that I love asking. Another way to say that sentence, and that is, what is the measurable win? Like, how do you know when you've done it? And what is the "it"? And the churches that clarify that the best, I call it the clarifying question. The ones that clarify that the best are on mission the best.
Now, I'll give you a story to tell you how you think, "Well, that's that's cleared. Move on to the next point." It's not clear because I, we, we could consult and coach churches as well. In fact, when people ask me to preach, I say, "Look, I could probably serve you better if you let me come be in your staff meeting on a Tuesday and meet with your team and help you. I can add more value to you. I'll preach, but they'll forget it. I forgot what I preached last time I preached. Come on, where y'all at, everybody?" Right? But, but I'd rather just get in a room and look at your systems and your, in your, what you're trying to accomplish. And I'll just tell you this, one of the exercises that I do, I'll, I usually like it around the number seven or eight people in the, in this room. Give me your top seven leaders, or for some churches, that's, that's all their staff leaders. And we're in a room, and, and I'll say, "What do you, what do you think the touchdown line is here?" Okay, everybody write it down privately. Okay, everybody reveal it publicly. And two things happen every single time. There's never been an exception yet, and that is, I get great answers and I get different answers. So they'll say things like, "Well, we want to reach our city." And the next person says, "We want to help the poor." And the next person says, "Man, we want the presence of God." All those are good things. They're just not the same things.
And the more you can clarify why we exist, the more you not only clarify it, but add language to it that everyone can answer. So if you would come to Highlands, our church, one of the things that people say they notice first is that whether they talk to a staff member or volunteer or member of the church, and you ask him, "What is this church all about?" They all not only say the same thing, but they say it in the same language. And I truly believe that whenever you have that kind of clarity of vision, this is why we exist. Now, in my opinion, we all have unique visions, things that we're called to do as churches that nobody else. Like, I don't think everybody's supposed to have a college. I think many of, I think we need a bunch more, but not everyone's called to that. But then we all have this same vision, and that's the Great Commission. Jesus was not unclear in the Great Commission. In fact, on the night, one of the Grow Conference, I spend about 40 minutes going Old Testament to New, showing 12 places in Old Testament and New How God has always wanted four things for us. And it's, and it's, to me, it's cover to cover clear. And I show it in a variety of different ways that God has always wanted lost people, say, "Lost people," pastored, "pastored people," discipled, "discipled people," mobilized. Lost people, say, "Lost people." Pastored, "pastored people." Discipled, "discipled people." Mobilized. Say it how you want to say it. This is what it is. This is the Great Commission.
When Pastor Rick Warren wrote his book, he had five purposes because he included the Great Commandment to love God in addition to the Great Commission of these four things. Say them how you want to say them. The call that we have been given by the Lord, that we have sworn our lives to, is to get lost people saved. Say, "Lost people." Pastored. Help them through their issues. Take "pastored people." And help them find their redemptive calling and gift. And then get the church mobilized. Say, "Mobilized people." The local church is the hope of the world. No, it's not. The local church that is mobilized is the hope of the world. Until we get everybody discipled and actually doing something that God has called them to do, that's when we win. We have to have a body that is functioning, connected, and getting the work done in Jesus' name. This is the assignment.
So, uh, it was back in 2011 that we, we tried several different ways to communicate this to people with moderate success. In fact, we, we tried so many different things, they were, they were comical. But one, we once tried to use it through the four cups of Passover because in the four cups of Passover, that's found in Exodus chapter 6, verses 6 and 7, that the Jewish people still use to this day and are in Passover Seder, there's these four things. Those four things are there. They have four cups, and it's these four things. God is always, because God has always wanted this. And so we were going to be at four cups church. Man, we're going to, like, we're going to do it through the cups, you know? Like, and then we had lost people, "Like, who's Moses? And what's a Passover?" You know, like, it was so confusing.
So on a whim, because we had moderate success in explaining the Great Commission to the people that we wanted to take it, lost people. I got together a group of lost people. Uh, I had my sister, who was my assistant, who also was a fitness instructor at a local gym. I said, "Go find me some completely lost people who don't go to church and tell them we'll pay them a hundred dollars for an hour of their time if they'll be a focus group for me." And I got in this focus group and I explained the Great Commission to them. So I explained the, I said, "I think God is always one of these four things, and here they are. And I need you to help me with language that you understand. Will you help me write it in a way that you would understand it? I'm not asking you to believe it or do it. I'm just asking you to help me write language for it." And that, that group that day came up with four phrases. Lost people came up with: No God, Find Freedom, Discover Purpose, Make a Difference. That there's the evangelism component. That people want to know God. They don't want to build your church. They don't want to make more people come to your church. They just wonder if he's real. Can I know him? And they, they don't want to be delivered or cast the devil out of them. But that's what it really is. That's what that's how people get free from their issues. That is how you pastor people because they have issues. They do. You do too, by the way. We all do. And if you don't think you have an issue, well, that's your issue. All right. So you, we all have it, right? Okay. But they, they didn't, they, you know, deliverance is really the word, but that's too much for a lost person. So they came up with the word "find freedom." Everybody wants to be free from something. Something that if you didn't have it in your life, your life would be better. By the way, we all have an area of our life that everyone in our life, our life would be better. And God still wants to free us. That's, that's what he does.
And then to discover your purpose, because you have one. Mark Twain says, "The two greatest days of your life: the day you were born, then the day you discovered why you were born." Still true. It's still true. But then once you discover your purpose, now you can get with the rest of the body of Christ and make a difference. We've used this language and lost people, our visitors can tell you these four things. Why? Because we clarify the vision. So step number one, I, I'm begging you to answer the question, "Why do we exist?" and to put language to it so that you can actually accomplish it. That's number one.
Let me give you the second thing. I'm giving you this entire conference. I got 15 minutes and 54 seconds left to give you the next four. Are you ready? Okay. Here's the second one. Then, what will we, what will we do to accomplish it? So now, what are we going to do? So what are we going to create for people to know God? Like, how are we going to do it? And these are what, this, this is the word "systems." People call me the systems guy, but everybody's a systems person. They only call you one if it works, right? So, but you have one. You're doing something to get something done. And the right way is the way that works.
So I'll tell you a story. I had a guy from Mobile, which is four and a half hours away from Birmingham, drove up to Birmingham to pick my brain, quote unquote. And I said, "Why do you want to pick my brain?" He goes, "If you'll let me pick your brain, I'll buy you lunch, because our church is 25 years old, we're stuck at 400, we can't grow. And I have a passion, and I think you can help me." I said, "All right, come on up, pick my brain, buy me lunch." He came, we met, and I said, "What do you want to accomplish?" I gave him question number one, basically, "What do you even mean?" And they gave me the Pentecostal answer. He goes, "Man, I want to reach my city for the glory of God." And he did it like that. "Glory of God." And I said, "Stop that. All right. So, um, so tell me what you really want." "I want to get lost people saved in Mobile." Sorry, there happens to be one of God's. So good job. All right. And, um, I said, "So, question number two, what are you doing to accomplish that?" "Because what do you mean?" I said, "Well, tell me what your Sundays are like. That's probably where they're checking you out for the first time. Tell me, tell me what those are like." Okay. He goes, "I don't understand." He goes, "How long are your services, dude?" He said, "Um, a little over two hours." And I did that. And, um, and I said, "Bro, that's a long time." He goes, "I know, I know, I know." I said, "Well, how much of that is you're preaching?" It goes, "A little over an hour." And I did that. And, um, and I said, "Wow, dude, that's a long time." He goes, "Yeah, but I'm really good." And I said, "If you were good, they'd be coming." And he didn't do that. He did not laugh. And he stuck his finger in my face. He says, "Well, I'm not changing that." I said, "Well, then I can't help you." I said, "Because you don't love your vision, you love your system. You don't love question number one, you love question number two. You've loved what you have done, even though you're telling me it's not working." He goes, "Well, I'm not changing that." I said, "Well, then I can't help you." And he left and didn't buy me lunch. Called me back three months later and said, "I repent. I'm sorry. I would do whatever you tell me to do." I said, "You have 35 minutes, not a second longer, this coming Sunday. It's a pastor. That's my introduction." I said, "Bro, they already know you. Get to the point." Like, it's the only thing he changed, and they doubled in three months because he was in love with what he was doing more than the question number one, what he was called to do. And I'm asking you the same question. The churches are notorious for keeping a model or a system that's simply not working. And I'm not asking to change what we do, I'm just telling you to do one that works. Stop defending something that's not working.
So what are you going to do? Well, for us, we have four things that we do. If we, we have chosen the weekend experience or the weekend service to be the way that we help people know God, because we have found right now that's just a good, it just works. So we have, we have created a visitor culture, a lost people culture. And I preach, there's nothing, there's nothing milk toast about it. We're not cut, but we are conscious of the fact that we have people that are far from God in our auditoriums. And I think most churches have done a pretty good job of that over the past 20 years. But our system for helping people get pastored and delivered and find freedom is groups. And most churches don't know how to make that work. We have to teach almost half a day to get people back into the group culture. But don't run from the small group culture, because it's in the heart of God, it's in the Bible. Real life change does not happen when you preach. Real life change always happens in the context of relationships. Always, always, always, always. I can prove it to you. Name the top five last sermons you preach. You can't tell me five people who've impacted your life, good or bad. You can, because life change has always happened in the context of relationships. We have to get back to that.
I wish I had time to talk to you about it. Our, our system for helping people discover their purpose is is a four-step growth track. And then our system for people being mobilized and making a difference is what we call a Dream Team. We've mobilized over 26,000 currently volunteers in our church because they're now doing the thing that God's called them to do. And I'd love to tell you more about that, but you have to create a model, a system, something that you're going to do.
And how do you know if it's the right one? Question number three. Write it down. And that is, how are we doing? So if I sat down with you, I would ask you, question number one, "Why do you exist? What's the measurable win? What's the touchdown?" Then I would ask you, question number two, "What are you doing to accomplish that?" You would tell me, you would tell me about your church services, your groups, your Sunday school, your ministries, whatever. And then I would ask the third question. This word gets real. I call this the reality question. And then it's okay, is it working? How are you doing? Is it working? What do you mean, is that? Are visitors coming? Are lost people getting saved? Are saved people getting pastored? Are pastored people getting discipled? Are discipled people getting mobilized? If not, we need to change some things. It's the, "How are we doing?" How are we doing is the great question that needs to be asked more frequently for all of us about our personal lives, our marriages.
I had a, I had when I was youth pastor at in Baton Rouge, back in the day, one of my jobs was to lock up our little youth building called Liberty Alley, uh, every night late because we left it open. There was a gym there, and I had the job of going back to the church at 10 o'clock and making sure everything, everything was locked up. I pulled up into the parking lot one evening at 10 p.m. and behind the youth building was a car with steamed-up windows. It was even moving a little bit. And I thought, "Ah, I'm going to tear these kids up." And I banged on that window. "I wrote down this window right now." And it was one of our elders, hey, brother Chris, 60-something years old, with his wife. I said, "Brother AJ, I am so sorry." He goes, "That's quite all right." He wrote it right back up. Well, I was newly married, bro. I'm gonna figure out, I'm finding you, my man. Tell me how, after 40 years of marriage, y'all still parking? Baby, I want to know. Mentor me. And he, I'll never forget what he told me. He goes, "We still date. We still make out. We still park." And I once a month, ask my wife, "How are we doing? How am I doing?" He goes, "I have kept the reality. I've never let it get away because it never happens overnight." If you have a bad marriage, it didn't happen overnight. But what if you were checking on it more regularly? I learned this. My wife and I have a date lunch or date night every Monday. We have for 36 years. She's on the front row of here. We, in fact, just celebrated our 36th wedding anniversary. Come more in love than we've ever been. And just, I mean, spend tons of time together, love the same. We're just having more fun living life and being Papa and Honey to our eight grandkids. And just, man, we're just having a ball. But we, but we ask each other all the time, "How am I doing? How are we?" I don't think we ask that question enough in our churches.
I don't think five things. Real quick, put them all on the screen. All five of them. If they will fit, all fit for me. You guys that we need to collect the data, evaluate the results, celebrate the wins, confront the facts, and get better. Yeah, just take a screenshot of that. I'm gonna move on because I'm out of time. Collect the data. You've got to count. Hey, everybody, you have to count. And you do count what matters. You're counting the offering, so you count what matters. I have five kids. I don't have somewhere between three and seven. Thank you. I know the number because you count what matters. So collect data, evaluate the results. And in other words, have debriefing moments. We have them every Sunday afternoon, Saturday morning. How did we do? How was Sunday? What could? And celebrate the wins. Don't be one of these people that's never satisfied. Have the guts to confront facts that you know. And always say, "Let me tell you how to confront the facts." If Pastor Rob Kettering became the pastor of your church tomorrow, what would he change first? That's what you need to change. Like, if you put, think of that mindset. And then be sure that you also just get better. Get better. Get better. Just keep getting better. Learn, grow, bring home an idea from conference, go implement it in your church. That's the third question.
So, why do we exist? What are we doing to accomplish it? Is it working? Number three. And here's number four. And that is, what are the keys to success? And this is a culture question. And I do two sessions at Grow Conference every year on culture. Don't miss this, because if you do everything right in a bad culture, it still doesn't work. If I drop a seed on this stage, you can come back next year to the River Valley Conference, and it'll still be here as a seed. Why? When the seed's fault, it wasn't even how I put it down, it wasn't what I, it was where I planted it that made it not work. This is not a conducive culture for a seed to germinate and to grow. And so culture is important. I can't, I do two sessions on culture because honestly, I think you can do the wrong thing in a good culture and have more success. When you have a life-giving culture, that to me is defined primarily by four things. That we are people who love God. We love, I'm in love with God. I mean, I'm serious. That we need to come to church on Sundays like we got saved last night. Come on, somebody, right? We love people. We love people. I know pastors who love crowds who don't love individuals. You've got to love people. Walk slowly through the crowd, high five, hug, just enjoy people. Love, write notes, go to lunch, laugh. Have candy in your pockets. Everybody. Jesus was that way, by the way. When you have kids, when they're, when kids are on top, there, the disciples trying to pull the kids off. You are not like Hollywood portrays Jesus, all malnourished and they always look like he's still in a curveball, like, foreign. He had to be, you know, Jolly Ranchers in his robe. I mean, that's the only way, that's the only way kids are hanging on you like that. They're like, "Oh, the kids, the kids." He hadn't been enjoyable. He had to have been. And we need to be as well. You know, the Bible says, I'm just going to divert here for a second because I feel led by the Holy Spirit to do it. But you know, the Bible says that the priest wore this robe that had bells on the bottom. Josephus, the extra-biblical writer, gives us the number because the Bible doesn't. He said Josephus says there were 72 bells sewn into the hem of this garment. It was blue, so it was a Santa Claus robe, but blue, but with bells. And the Bible says he is to wear it. The, the sound of the bells must be heard as he comes in to minister and as he leaves. I mean, he was jingling all the way. Everybody, are you listening to me? And we need to do the same. We need to bring life, joy, happiness, humor. Come on. Just number three, love God, love people. I say pursue excellence. We need to do, if we do it, do it well. Just do it well. And then finally, choose joy. I mean, have some, have some joyful, an attitude of joy. And that it just makes all the difference. Serve the Lord with gladness. And watch what happens. Just watch what happens. Tell a Boudreaux joke. Just whatever. Don't have to get it right. Just try one.
Ever so, we're going to, I'm just helping you with, if, if I had time to give you a full thing, I'm giving you the outline, the bones of it. That is, you have to clarify the measurable win. You've got to create a system that actually delivers what you're trying to accomplish. And you only know that if you're measuring it, if you're checking out, "How are we doing?" Always focusing on culture. What are the keys to success?
And here's my last question. It's my favorite question. It's my favorite question in the world. And that is, what is most important right now? What is most important right now? Because not everything is equally as important all the time. So twice a year, I get my entire staff together. Well, I used to do the whole staff until we got to a certain size. And now I'll do it with a top 70 of our team. And we sit in a room for about three hours. And it's, it's open discussion. And we don't leave the room until we all agree to the answer to this question. Because I call it the lowest slat of a bucket. In fact, when I teach this, I actually bring a wooden bucket. Notice, just imagine in your mind a wooden bucket with wooden slats. And they're all tall except for one. It doesn't matter how tall all the other slats are. The water is always running out at the level of the lowest slat. Okay? And we all have a lower slat. But do you know what it is? If you don't know what it is, you don't know where the water is running out.
Like, currently, I'll tell you our lowest slat. And I've been working on it for the past year. And I, I did the first repair to the slat on February 27th. And I'm putting the final repair on it in fall when the kids come back to school. And that is our student and children's ministry. I'm convinced you get people back in church after COVID by creating something that the kids have to attend to experience. And I think, I think it's the parents' most concerned right now. I think the biggest concern about family right now are their kids because they're in, they've been in lockdown, and they're lonely, and they're thinking bad thoughts, and they're watching the wrong things. And we have found that past families, we've had families tell us, "We love our church, but our kids need a Six Flags trip and a van ride and worship on the floor again, like the school, the youth group they all grew up in." They were basically saying, "We're too big." I said, "No, we're not." So we can, we can fix this. And now we're kind of going old school, kind of the youth group we all grew up in, to to minister to our kids again. And we even put graded curriculum in our, in our children's ministry so that if you give us six years from first grade to sixth grade, we can tell you that they will know the Bible because they'll learn this in year one, year two, year three, year four. But you got to come every Sunday because if you don't, you'll miss a part of the Bible. But I promise you, if you give us six years of your kids' life in children's church, we're not babysitting. We will teach them the word of God. Are y'all following, everybody?
[Applause] And we grew 20% in one month of the ones getting them back just because they knew we were focusing on their kids. We found our lowest slat, and we're fixing it. Are y'all listening to me? What's yours? In fact, I'll ask it another way. Write this down if you're a note-taker. And that is, "What one thing, if it got better, would make the biggest difference?" Like, what one thing in your church, if it got better, would make the biggest difference? You answer that question, I promise you, the water level of the whole will happen.
But I know this, I know this, and that is that God wants your church to grow because people matter to God. Do you believe that, everybody? You'll get anything out of this session this morning? Yes or no? Yes. All right. So I'm gonna pray for you. And again, if there's anything I can do to serve you, it'd be the honor of my life to do, uh, to do in any way. So y'all told you where the resources are. And of course, you're following. If you're part of this network of churches, you really have one of the greatest models. And I don't say this to float his boat, I wouldn't say it if I didn't believe it, but I'm telling you, Pastor Rob Kettering is a, is a church builder. He and Becca understand church, and they, they just get it. And so I promise you, you have found one of the greatest models. Can we thank our hosts for this conference, everybody else? All right.
Once you open your hands, just open your hands before the Lord. Whoever's going to take it from me can come on up. And let me just pray for you. Father, I pray for every pastor, leader. And God, I just pray that you would help them grow in every way. God, let us really understand the reality of the assignment that we've been given. And I'm praying, God, for an anointing to be on their life to see the church grow. God, we want to care for people the way you do. Give us a heart and a passion for the kids that are lost, the people that you care about so much. And Lord, I speak a blessing over every church, God, in every way, on their teams, their finances, their vision, their anointing, their preaching, their prayer, every part of what we do, God, for the glory of the one that we serve. God, I pray that you would help us to get better in every way. And we will give you all the glory. In Jesus name, and everybody said, "A good amen." God bless you.