03 Jacob Hoyer | Embracing a Missional Mindset

Andrew Estes (00:09)

Well, welcome back to the Nexus Church Planting podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Estes, and today I'm joined by a good friend of mine, Jacob Hoyer. Jacob is a pastor, church planter. He also is the resource director for Forge America. And in this episode, we're really excited dive into some of the work that Forge America is doing through

establishing truly a missional mindset for people that are really intentional about shifting their churches to multiplying disciples. so, Jacob, so excited to have you with us today, man.

Jacob Hoyer (00:39)

Yeah, I'm excited to be here. And I think like you and I have had lots of these kinds of conversations and this is the first time we get to record it. So that's exciting.

Andrew Estes (00:46)

For sure, man. Yeah, for better or worse. know, we'll see what happens today. It should be good. No, I'm excited, man. So I met Jacob back at the end of 2018. And so our church planting journey started a long time ago when we first got connected with Nexus and I got introduced to this thing called the Vision Frame and just kind of immediately fell in love and just totally drank the Kool-Aid with the Vision Frame like...

Jacob Hoyer (00:49)

Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right.

Andrew Estes (01:11)

Uh, like you did as well. so, I mean, we just fell headlong into all of the intentional training and certifications that happened alongside that. And at the end of 2018, I met Jacob in Dallas at a training called Younique, which is, know, a personal vision journey about identifying your own core mission and values and things of that nature. But we got to go through that process together and I have stayed connected ever since just walking through a lot of different trainings together. And so, um, super excited for you to be here today, man.

Why don't you give some of our listeners just a little bit of backdrop into some of your development, some of your story, some of what you've been doing in ministry over the last several years.

Jacob Hoyer (01:51)

Yeah, for sure. I grew up the son of a church planter. so have like, my dad started a church in 84. I was born in 85. So I grew up with that church. And so that's kind of been the sea I swim in. Let a church plant myself in 2015, we launched worship. So we're about 10 years in. And that was actually Life Unique where you and I connected with a program I was looking at alongside of Forge America at the time.

in both ways trying to figure out how do we mobilize people as everyday missionaries. We kind of landed on using both Life Younique for Personal Calling and Forge America content for like shifting people's perspective to be more missional. And so I continue to use both of those tools. I've now picked up a role with Forge America, but I find that both of them like helping people understand the grand mission of God and where the church fits in. That's kind of what I find in Forge. And then

helping people uncover their personal calling, that's what we do with Life Younique.

Andrew Estes (02:49)

Yeah, absolutely, man. So you do a man of many hats. I so you have several different roles. I know that you still do your church planting and the pastoral stuff, but doing a lot of network training and things like that around vision frame and mission and vision and really helping align organizations and individuals towards what they feel like God's called them to do. so, I'd love to hear, you know, specific and, you know, maybe just in your church planting journey initially.

Jacob Hoyer (02:53)

That's right.

Andrew Estes (03:15)

Can you give us just a little bit of an overview of what the last 10 years has looked like for you and your church?

Jacob Hoyer (03:20)

Yeah, my wife and I met when we were both working in international missions. So we spent three years working in short-term international missions. We met in the first year and then dated and got married. And so for us, that impacts a lot of the way that we've done church. So from the beginning, we were saying, what would it look like to build a church of missionaries? And the missions program we worked in was for young adults and we would train people to live and work as a team of missionaries on the field.

and everything that came with. learning to give and receive feedback from one another, learning to respect each other's gifts. And so the founding kind of question for me in our church planting journey was, how do we give people that missions experience without them having to leave the country? So how do we give them an understanding of being a group of missionaries, excuse me, on mission together in a church context? And so that's been our journey.

through that have like kind of landed on very minimal programming because what we want to do is free people up with as much time to live the mission in their everyday life. So in their homes, in their neighborhoods, in their workplaces. so what that means is for us at times people will come to us like if they've got an Attractional Church mindset, they're going like, well, where are all the programs? And we're saying like, well, your life is the chief program we're trying to equip you for, you know.

⁓ And so that means like a lot of our core people have been folks who either are have worked in ministry before or currently work in parachurch ministry who are kind of over the program driven models and and they're and they're compelled by the way that we're thinking about mission the other group of people we reach a lot are folks who for whatever reason are Just really value our ⁓ Highly relational approach. So now we're a church ten years in that worship

worships between 60 and 80 people on a Sunday. We don't have a building of our own. we rent from other people. We actually just moved this year. And any program we do run is focused, we call it training, and it's training you to live out the mission in your everyday life. So that's been a, we now are at a point where I pastor the church part-time. I have a co-pastor who's also part-time.

and we have a music director who gets a small stipend and we really are just kind of a band of about 100 to 150 people total probably who call our church home and are figuring out what it looks like to do church on mission together. And I think every year, like we're unrolling our budget, we'll do Pledge Sunday in a couple of weeks and every year about this time I'm like, yeah, I guess I would just, know, even if there was no money, I would just do this. That's kind of what it's become for us and for our community is like.

Andrew Estes (06:00)

Yeah.

Jacob Hoyer (06:01)

This is just our faith community and we're figuring it out. So, yeah.

Andrew Estes (06:04)

Yeah, yeah,

no, that's fantastic, man. Well, that's a, yeah, that whole church planting journey is, is beautiful and difficult and all the things. And so just grateful for just that shared experience with, with your work with Forge America, for those that aren't familiar, can you just give us a little bit of background into what Forge America is and some of your role that you do with that organization?

Jacob Hoyer (06:26)

Yeah, so ⁓ Forge actually began in Australia a long time ago. mean, longer ago than it started in the by ⁓ Alan and Deb Hirsch and Michael Frost are the founders over there. And really what it was was ⁓ Alan and Michael in particular were working in seminaries and denominations and they were realizing that pastors were coming out of seminary without a clear understanding of mission. So they knew how to run church, but not how to do mission.

So they started to create some training and some sort of relationship in that context to help leaders understand mission. Since then, Forge came to the US in 2010. So it's been about 15 years. Forge is also active in Canada and Germany and Scotland and a couple other places I'm probably forgetting. And so for us in the US, it's been for a long time, like a relational network first.

So it's a relational network of missional leaders. And the last couple of years, we started to tighten up on content, which is some of what we'll probably talk about today. But at its core, Forge America is still just a network of people who are supporting each other. Because what we find is when you're working in the Western church, when you start to think missionally, and by that will mean sending over gathering, people can look at you like you're crazy. And so...

Forge is a community of people who can look at each other and go like, hey, you're not crazy. Like, we're really called to train people to live the mission of their everyday life. And so it's become sort of, for a couple of our people, it really is a lifeline to them staying committed to the mission of God and not just kind of burning out on church organization. that's ⁓ what we do. We now do, we say we do training, resourcing, and gathering.

So we have Forge members, people who pay a monthly or annual fee to be a part of the Forge tribe. And then, and that gives them access to training, resourcing and gathering. Yeah, training is like online training, usually in-person cohorts. Resourcing is talks, tools and courses to train people in your context. And we do two big gatherings a year, a national gathering and a conference.

Andrew Estes (08:35)

Yeah, let's, I'd love to go back. mean, for those that are unfamiliar with Alan Hirsch, with Michael Frost, I mean, there's been a lot of writing and different things like that, you know, in particular on like the five-fold ministry or like the Ephesians, you know, four type of ministry model, apostle prophets, evangelist, shepherds, teachers, and things of that nature and equipping people to do like you're talking about to live on mission. Going back to, you know, just people that are unfamiliar with Alan Hirsch or Michael Frost.

Can you give us just a little bit more on some of that and then even just kind of like tying that into, you know, just the tension that you face between just like kind of running ministry programs and we'll impact this quite a bit more about the running ministry programs and just the initial heartbeat of why Forge started, like moving towards a mission, like what's the difference?

Jacob Hoyer (09:22)

Yeah, so that's great. So actually, like to understand the writings of Hirsch and Frost, we can even go back farther David Bosch and Leslie Newbiggin. And I actually, I had heard people talk about Newbiggin a lot. I got a better understanding of his role in Western Mission when I actually read Michael Frost's book called

mission is the shape of water. So mission is the of water is like a history of mission in Christendom. And he has a chapter there on New Big and New Big and was an in cross cultural international missionary to Asia. And when he came back from the field

he saw the church in the West and he was like, why aren't they doing ministry like we did on the mission field? And really, what that means is this, is in the Western church, we tend to expect people to come to us. In mission, we expect the church to go to the people. And so where that gets really detailed is like, well,

there are cultural barriers that are obstacles to the gospel. In the mission world, we expect the missionary to cross the cultural barriers, language, dress, custom. The missionary should adapt to the person they're trying to reach. In the Western church, we tend to ask the person we're trying to reach to cross the barriers to get to us. So somebody attends a worship service, they have to learn the dress, learn the custom, learn the language in order to participate. And so for us at its base, mission is about

we go to people who don't ask people to come to us. And so this is what the driving force kind of foundational concept of mission was that Hirsch and Frost picked up from Bosch and Newbiggan. Hirsch and Frost were writing in the first couple of decades of the 21st century and widely read by some corners of church leadership in the West to say, we need to recover this movement to a way of Christianity, Christianity as a movement that goes toward people.

And so for us, when we start unpacking that, what it means is when we build up lots and lots of programs inside the church, intrinsically we're assuming that our strategy is get people to come to a program. And that's reinforcing that, making the person we're trying to reach across the cultural barriers against us, learn our patterns of behavior, learn our language. And so we're trying to flip that and say, how can you structure your church not for gathering people and programs?

but for sending the people you have to be missionaries in there every day.

Andrew Estes (11:56)

Yeah, that's beautiful. And I love just the history that we get to walk through in some of that type of stuff. I know that one of the resources that we have kind of shared is some of Mancini's material with the future church. I know that you mentioned that you walked through some of the training resources of that over the last like 60, 80 years of what American churches kind of looked like in these different phases, these different stages. Can you, I'd love to just start there and just kind of unpack like what is

those some of the different transformational models and just philosophies, mindsets, principles that we've walked through from, you know, over the last several years in ministry here.

Jacob Hoyer (12:37)

Yeah, and so that's the way that Mancini talks about it in Future Church with his co-author Corey Hartman, think on that. ⁓ It's like, yeah, okay, perfect. Yes, great. Yes, yeah. So Mancini and Hartman is Future Church and they kind of lay out four big 20 year eras of church growth from 1940 to 2020.

Andrew Estes (12:49)

Yeah, I actually just interviewed Corey not too long ago with some of the stuff that he'd been doing. Yeah, so it was good.

Jacob Hoyer (13:08)

begins in 1940, 1960, they call that the wartime revival. And there it was like church as pillar of what it means to be citizen in your community. And so the idea of what it means to be a part of the church is to be a good citizen. This is where you start getting the American flag at the front of the worship service and that sort of thing. Then there's the golden era of denominationalism from 1960 to 1980.

This is where I think usually when I'm recounting this this is where I begin with folks because they can see it most clearly this is when people started leaving urban centers suburbia started to boom and the church planting strategy was ⁓ Put a church of your brand in a place where people are about to move and then that church will grow as people move into the area and look for their brand of Christianity

⁓ The pinnacle of this strategy that I heard is I know a guy who I grew up in a mainline denomination and this guy, he was in the Iowa district. So my denomination of heritage is the Lutheran Church of Missouri Synod. It's all over the Midwest, so Iowa's very big. They bought a double wide trailer, so the Iowa district bought a double wide trailer. And what they would do is they would take that trailer to a town.

and they would just put out a sign and anybody, any Lutheran who moved to town would look for Lutheran Church, they'd find this one. They'd worship in the trailer until they had enough people to raise money to build a building. Then they'd take the trailer to the next town and start over again. And so that was, it was like.

Andrew Estes (14:38)

Wow. And they were

like very creative in the naming of churches back then. was like first Christian church, like second Christian church, third Baptist church, like all the,

Jacob Hoyer (14:42)

That's right. That's

right. right. So that's 1940 or 1960 to 80 golden era of denominationalism. Then we get into 80 to 2000 and this is where Saddleback and Willow Creek and North Point, these models begin to proliferate. And so it was like when customer service and organizational strategy came into the church. And the way I like to describe it is like,

we discovered in that period that we could actually build disciples efficiently. And so it was like, if we can systematize our programs and think customer service, we can run a bunch more people through here. so churches grew very large and, or a few churches did, grew very large. And it became best practice to be very systematized and organizational in your thinking.

Then around 2000 is when that's when the writings of people like Hirsch and Frost started to kind of pop up in the Western Church. And really the thing there was to say, okay, yeah, in that what Mancini and Hartman called the new permission era, that's the 1980 to 2000, yeah, we can run things efficiently, but the question is whether it's actually

if we're actually discipling effectively. So we can grow very large, but are we actually seeing the outcomes we're looking for? And this is where then Hearst and Frost started to, what Mancini and Hartman call the missional reorientation was when there was a bunch of thought leadership in the first 20 years of this century to help us begin to rethink what church is really about. Is it about gathering or is it about sending? And so, but what...

Mancini and Hartman are clear to say in future church is that period of missional reorientation was not a reorientation of programs or structure of the church. It was a reorientation of thinking. And so what's happening when I'm working with churches around the country is we can use this and this came out of future church as well using those areas to do a dig on like a reflection on which of those areas most impacts your church. You can break it down by percentage.

So all of our churches are a mix of all of these church growth philosophies. What happened in the missional reorientation is we began to think differently, but we didn't necessarily change our models. And so what we've begun to see around Forge America is there are people who are saying, they're now realizing that the models they picked up from the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, those models aren't working for them anymore. And so they go, we need a new model.

And what we around Forge are starting to say is like, before you jump into a new model, you need to make sure you've actually shifted your mindset. And so that period of missional reorientation from 2000 to 2020 is a key step for any ministry that wants to see things shift in our time, is we have to first rethink the way that we pattern ministry before we change the model.

So that's one of our taglines is like, you don't need a new model, you need new mindset. I really think missional thinking is model neutral. We can adapt it into any model because it's really about shifting the paradigm of kind of how things are built.

Andrew Estes (18:14)

for sure. I love just the brief flyover of some of that recent history and even in that like 60 to 80s range, people weren't like Christ followers. They were either like Baptist or Lutheran or Methodist or non-denominational and it was like hard line, everybody else is the enemy and it's our way and it was tribal and that was the primary focus. then, you

Jacob Hoyer (18:27)

Mm-hmm.

Andrew Estes (18:36)

That's a lot of those lines that kind of come out of that 80s and 90s type of thing wasn't like, hey, we didn't need another church. We need a different kind of church and shifting towards that seeker sensitive type of model. then even within the missional reorientation or the last, you know, early, early 2000s was the, some of the thing it was just like big church is bad and we have to shift away from, from that.

Jacob Hoyer (18:58)

Yeah.

Andrew Estes (19:01)

It's been good to have some of these conversations where it's just like, we don't have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. We don't have to like totally blow up all of our resources and buildings and facilities. But like, how do we actually have these conversations about instilling mission into the life of ministry that we're currently doing? And if things need to change, that's fantastic. But if they don't, then, you know, what does need to change? What does need to shift? Like, how can we equip people? And I love having those conversations with leaders.

What are some of the things that you guys do initially? I so you move into those mindsets, some of that paradigm, and I want to live in some of that conversation for our time today. What are some of the first things that you do when you're walking church leaders to have that conversation, to break down, you know, like, yeah, we're good. And, you know, we have people show up on Sunday, like we have, you know, people in small groups, we have all these different things and we're doing, you know, rooted or we're doing this or that. you know, we feel like things are going well.

How do you approach that conversation initially to really start challenging leaders to think differently?

Jacob Hoyer (20:05)

Yeah, so I'll say historically, by the time somebody engages with Forge America organizationally, they've already been disturbed somewhere else. And that's where being an organization that began in thought leadership, very often they're engaging one of the books or they've seen one of those thought leaders at a conference and then they find their way to us.

And so the message is already ringing true with them. and most often the way I hear it is kind of the way I described it to you is like, it's the youth pastor who got frustrated with his large, attractional church and said, all right, fine, I'm gonna go start a house church then. And what we're saying, and what I would say to that person is that's where I'm saying like,

Okay, you can start a house search if you want, but just changing the model isn't going to fix the problem. And so, to answer your question, for us, it does begin in that ⁓ who's crossing the barriers. So that's the first talk we give. We call cultural distance, where we draw a diagram about who's crossing the cultural barriers to get to whom. and, and that's our principle of mission.

is we need to be sending people not gather. And usually when you draw that diagram for people, there's an aha moment because the kind of the line that brings the aha moment is we've been asking the people we reach to be the missionaries. We've been asking them to be the missionaries to us. And usually when you say that light bulbs go on for people. And so if they're open to change or they're open to new idea, that usually does it for them. And that's where we begin.

Andrew Estes (21:43)

Yeah, yeah, that's good. How does that land for most, you know, I mean, are you doing most of your training just specifically with church leaders or do you do it with church attenders as well? People that are just living out some of that calling and things like that and how does that land with people?

Jacob Hoyer (21:59)

So it's all different. ⁓ Forge historically has had a hub based model. So there are still people who call themselves like Forge Knoxville or Forge Austin or Forge city name. And so they're running trainings with lots of different kinds of people. We have some programs that we run nationally that are primarily with church leaders, but also lay people. And so, but I would say most people,

Again, by the time they're engaging with us in some fashion, they're open to that message and they go, okay, so what do we do? I would say some of the pushback you get is like, well, but I'm an introvert. They assume this means, so they assume that means that disqualifies them from being a missionary, which I'm laughing because to me at this point that, but it's a real hesitation people have. I think another pushback you get is like, well, yeah, but isn't the church supposed to serve?

the church people that can become a nuanced conversation about how mission really is discipleship. Like we grow as we go, which is another one of our five core principles is helping people grow through doing not just grow through learning. Yeah.

Andrew Estes (23:07)

Yeah, yeah.

Can you give us those five principles and just kind of lay them out for us? That'd be awesome.

Jacob Hoyer (23:10)

Yeah, perfect. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. I was like hesitating because I can, I can get off on my soapbox, but I appreciate you team me up specifically. So yeah. So it's, the five core principles. Yeah. So the five core principles go mission context, community formation and practice. And I have a PDF we can like put in the show notes or whatever. That's something people say on podcasts. So yeah. so, so mission is cultural distance. It's who's crossing the barriers to get to whom.

Andrew Estes (23:15)

No, you're kidding. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, you shared a couple of them, but yeah.

Sure, that'd be fantastic. Yeah.

Jacob Hoyer (23:37)

and it should be incumbent on those who are empowered by the Spirit to be the ones who go and cross the barriers. So I like to say we need to take church to people, not people to church. And then context is about sort of how we lead. And so we use a diagram that actually is in the book Tangible Kingdom by Hugh Halter and Matt Sinead. And so what we do is we're taking the typical organizational structure

and we're tipping it on its side. And so we're saying rather than getting people up under an organizational structure, our leaders shouldn't sit at the top, they should be out front. So we call that tool practitioners first. So even the leader at the top or the front of an organization should be a missional practitioner. Everybody in your organization should be practicing the mission of God in their everyday life. And then we just invite people along. And there's more to it than that, but that's the principle.

So it's about identifying to whom and with whom your sins. That's context. Who are the people I'm called to reach and who are the people God is sending with me? Community, the tool is a Venn diagram. That's what it looks like. We call it the tangible kingdom tool. It's also in the book, Tangible Kingdom. But we talk about how a kingdom culture is the overlap of our connection with God, our connection with one another and our connection with our neighbor. And what we wanna talk about is like,

It's not as simple as, great. So I have God programs, us programs and neighbor programs. And once I run all those programs, that's the kingdom. So well, no, what happens is when our relationships include all of those things, then there's like a spark in our relationship that is the kingdom. And so we're coaching people into how are you navigating those three kinds of environments and leaving room for relationships so that kingdom relationships can flourish. And those first three,

mission, context, and community are sort of at the organizational level. And then the last two, formation and practice, are where we get down to individuals and discipleship. formation is action, reflection, learning. This is where we say we have to act our way into a new way of thinking, because we're not going to think our way into a new way of acting. And so what that looks like is ⁓ this is in The Shaping of Things to Come by Hirsch and Frost. And there they...

Andrew Estes (25:55)

Hmm.

Jacob Hoyer (26:04)

draw the diagram where it's like, we tend to think we can go learning and that will lead to behavior. And that's a Western way of thinking. But the Eastern way of thinking is I'm gonna train you into a new way of thinking. And so I like to talk about like, if you're riding a bike, you don't take a kid in front of a whiteboard and give a keynote talk on how to ride a bike. You just stick on the thing and shove, right? And so it's the same thing with living on mission. You just like go.

Andrew Estes (26:20)

Hmm, that's good.

Very lovingly,

lovingly shove them.

Jacob Hoyer (26:33)

Yeah, you you

trail behind them and watch after, that's actually the practice tool. So we'll talk about that next. But, ⁓ so formation is if we want people to live on mission, if we try to educate them into it, they'll never feel educated enough. And so at some point you have to say, just go do it and then come back to me with questions. And this is even what we see Jesus doing in the way he mobilized people. It's like, he sends the disciples out, then they go debrief the experience and that's how they learn.

And so then lastly, the last one is ⁓ we call the principle of practice. The tool is the practitioner's journey. And this is something you and I have connected on through future church content as well. I lean on Dave Rhodes a lot from my understanding of this tool, but it's about taking people through a learning curve. And really it's about outlining how mentorship and apprenticeship work. And that if we're going to shape people as missional practitioners,

they're gonna be shaped in mentor apprentice relationships. And so it's about helping people move along and then helping people move through that curve and then helping those mentors retreat back along that learning curve to walk with people along the way. So that's the five core principles, mission, context, community, formation and practice.

Andrew Estes (27:49)

Yeah, yeah, those are fantastic, man. I love that. So, so in a training context, you're just kind of like introducing these to a lot of people and just helping them just kind of gauge like, where do they feel stuck?

Jacob Hoyer (28:02)

Yeah, and really like for us, they go in sequence. so like in a train the trainer environment, we'll try to do all five. And what we're finding more and more is like, as you, if a person is using this in their congregation, we need to give them more bite sized tools to have these conversations individually. But for us, they really do go in sequence because it's like, Hey, before we cover any of it, we have to understand this issue of sending, not gathering. You got that? Okay.

Now if we're sending, how do we go? Well, we go together. And as we go together, we bring people along who might discover in our community the power of Christ. And so yeah, we're walking through those principles, helping them evaluate their context. So really like, we just launched a new program called Missional Culture Project. It's a grant funded project where we're gonna get to take eight to 10 churches through training each year. And we're in the middle of our first cohort. And so here like over the holidays, they've now over about,

four or five months since July, they've gotten those five core principles in an in-depth way, as well as some training on adaptive leadership. We're have them do during the holidays is evaluate their programming. Okay, now you've taken in all five of those core principles, let's look at your discipleship outcomes in your congregation, and let's look at your discipleship programs. Are those two things working for you? Are you producing the results you're looking for?

And are you doing it in a way that works for your congregation? And yes or no are viable answers to either of those questions. Based on your answer to those two questions, then we can begin to help you think about how do you want to adapt your discipleship structure to produce more the missional results that you're looking for, whether that's more of a current result or a different result. And so really it does come back to discipleship, discipleship programming, discipleship mindset.

is about how are we shaping people to live as everyday missionaries. And really it is, it's like, cause I know your question was like, okay, so how do you do that? And it's, yeah, we're training on those paradigms and then it's 100 % contextual. So in our missional culture project cohort, we have a church of 600 with a 60 year old school, and we have a church of 15 people who meets monthly in a bar. and we can apply these principles in,

in either of those contexts and all across the spectrum. But it all is contextual.

Andrew Estes (30:26)

Yeah.

Yeah, that's great. Do you have any just like stories or case studies that you could kind of share with us of churches that have kind of gone through just some of these paradigm shifts and just some of the fruit that that's a bearing?

Jacob Hoyer (30:39)

For us, I'll say the thing we're trying to tackle in our congregation currently, and this will be like a challenge we're facing now that points to what's working well for us, is a challenge for us right now is like we have a bunch of people who conceive of themselves as missionaries in our city, ⁓ but they all kind of conceive of themselves doing it on their own. So right now our church, our congregation, can sometimes feel a little disconnected from one another because they're also focused on mission in their own individual context.

And so we have a person who is a volunteer sheriff's chaplain. We have a couple of people who work for Young Life. We have a couple of people who work at the university campus. they all understand themselves as on mission where they are. The struggle for us is how we can figure out how to do it together, because we're all pretty highly apostolic group. And that's where ⁓ my friend

Melinda who is in our congregation who's the volunteer sheriff's chaplain. I remember She came to our she came to our church and and she's the kind of person who I'd love to have run my programs She's a faithful follower of Jesus. She's walked people through inner healing before she had an established like kind of ministry perspective And I was like, this is great. She's also really good at maintaining boundaries So every time I brought up her running a program she would say I don't have time for that Okay, fine, and I try to keep her way programming minimal. So and I know I don't want to bog her down

But I was like, man, you'd be great for this. Well then eventually she came to me and she said, you know, know a pastor here in town who's a sheriff's chaplain. He said they need a woman and would I do it? And she's like, I think the Lord's calling me to do this. Which I thought, if you can be a sheriff's chaplain, you can run my programs. But instead I said, okay, sure. I just signed a letter. I wrote a letter for her to say she could do this. And now she's like all the way in on being a sheriff's chaplain. And what's interesting is most people who do that, they...

One of the roles of a sheriff's chaplain is when there's a death, they go on the death notification. So they go tell the family that somebody died. And most of these sheriff's chaplains, that's the only time they show up is when they have a specific duty to perform. Well, Melinda started like going on ride-alongs with deputies, showing up to the precinct. She started a practice of every time there was a birthday, she would bake a cake and have it in the break room for the sheriff's deputies. Every time they do a shift change, so like,

every quarter or something, the night shift changes to day shift and the day shift changes to night shift, so it's like a really long day. And so she brings breakfast during the shift change. And she was like, doing so well, they gave her a volunteer award. And then they wanted her to like do some training for other chaplains in other areas. And she came to me and she was like asking me to, I was like helping her think about how to do this training. And she was explaining to me her philosophy of how to do this ministry. And I was like, Melinda, this is fantastic.

I was like, where did you learn this? She was like, I learned it at our church at Wellspring. I learned it from you. I was like, ⁓ that's fantastic. Right. ⁓ Because she just picked it up in the way that we do church, because it's for us, these principles are embedded into the way that we do faith community. so then ultimately, like again, we had a focus for a year of people taking their next step.

So we called it Next Step Disciples, that was our theme for the year. And we had led people through an exercise of reflecting on what their next step might be, writing it on a card. person in our congregation, Lauren, had written on her card that day, she was like, she felt like the Lord was telling her she needed to talk to Melinda about helping with the deputies. And then she stuck it in her purse. And we got this story months later. So she sticks the card in her purse.

She said several weeks later she was cleaning out her purse and she found that card again. And she realized, I don't want to throw this card away until I do it. But she thought, Lauren has a young child, she has a job, she's like, I can't help. Melinda ministered to deputies. But the next time they were together she said, Melinda, this might sound crazy, but is there any way that I can help you with the deputies? And immediately Melinda sighs a sigh of relief.

And she goes, my gosh, can you bake cakes? Because she'd been doing these birthday cakes and it'd been getting to be a lot. So she asked Lauren, can you bake cakes? And Lauren's response was, is that it? Because she thought, and she goes, I love to bake cakes. And she was like, she said, she thought like she had built this up in her head, like I can't ask more, there's nothing I can do to help. You know, I don't have any role here. When she finally asked, it was a perfect like passion fit.

Andrew Estes (35:17)

Mm.

Jacob Hoyer (35:17)

And so

now Lauren bakes the cakes and she and Melinda meet up so she can hand them off and they're partnered together in that ministry. And so these are like, when I tell the stories, I'm like, these are very simple things. But what it's getting people to do is think about their faith formation, not just for themselves, but for how it extends the kingdom into other places. And so we've got, like that, the Lauren part of that story is really compelling to me because

We've got Lauren listening for how the Lord is leading her, not just for herself, but for the extension of the kingdom into the neighborhood. And then she partners with Melinda to do it. so that's like an example for us. Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Estes (36:02)

When you are, think one of the things that you mentioned earlier was like once you kind of adopt these like missional orientation, like principles that you've, you mentioned that you can kind of adapt that to any type of a model. I'd love for you to unpack that a little bit more of like whether it's a church of 600 or a church, like a house church of 15 and things of that nature. Can you just kind of speak directly to that?

Maybe even in particular, maybe some of those like more program driven church from like 200 or well beyond that, what that looks like. And we get so active with all of the filling the calendar of this study and this study and this event and this event and this training and this outreach and all the different things. How do you instill effectively this type of missional mindset into the life of the church?

Jacob Hoyer (36:50)

Yeah, so what I'm about to talk about is recognize Andrew. It's like a lot of like vision framing.

future church kind of concepts because it really is about clarifying what our outcome is and then adapting our strategy to fit it. But really it's like the example I'll give is my home church used to do a road cleanup. And they used to talk about, know, out of the simple church kind of resources, they talked about live, love, learn.

live life as a gift and a calling, receive and give away the love of God, learn and share the word of God. And that was about where the clarity stopped. And so they would run this road cleanup program, and this is a church of hundreds. And so they would run this road cleanup program, and then there was a woman who it came to be her responsibility to organize the road cleanup program.

And she was frustrated one day, I remember, or was trying to explain something. was like, well, for example, what do you want people to do? Oh, live, love, learn. Okay, live. You want to give away love you've got. And I was like, so what's the best way to help them do that? She was like, not cleaning up the road on Saturday morning. Because she realized that getting them to love their family member or their neighbor, them picking up trash, wasn't changing them.

They just felt like they were checking the box. And so I said, well, what if we could use that program to help them think about how they're serving? So what if after we cleaned up the trash, we huddled up and had a little discussion about what it felt like to do something that didn't benefit you at all, and then help them capture a takeaway about how they wanted to serve somebody they actually see every day. And so that's like, that's a small shift you can make to go take a program you're already running.

and make it not just about the program, but make it about training. And Final Fusion, they'll talk about adapt, adopt and augment your programs. Adapt your program, adopt a new program or augment your program with relationship. And so there are ways we can tweak stuff we're already doing to make it more training focused and sending focused.

rather than gathering focus and attendance focused. Does that make sense?

Andrew Estes (39:06)

Yeah,

it is a beautiful conversation just to be able to help people just kind of shift in and move into some of those intentional mindsets towards like, is what we're doing actually effective or is it just checking a box? Like that's such a massive conversation when you have that evaluative conversation around everything that you do and say like, what purpose does this serve?

Jacob Hoyer (39:06)

Yeah, I think like

Andrew Estes (39:27)

I remember having that conversation with a children's ministry leader a couple of years ago. They spent all this time and energy of doing like a kids production of some kind of Christmas something. They do it during or right after service one Sunday. And I just asked him the question. I was like, so how do you guys evaluate how successful that was? And he was like, that's a really good question. And it just kind of stuck in like, I don't know, we've just always done it.

Jacob Hoyer (39:54)

Right.

Andrew Estes (39:55)

I like, okay, I'm not saying it's bad or good. It's just like, you know, like

Jacob Hoyer (39:55)

And the honest answer is, based on how many people show up. Yeah.

Andrew Estes (39:59)

how do you gauge like whether it's effective or not? Like, why do you do it?

Jacob Hoyer (40:02)

Yeah,

yeah. And the honest answer is, it depends on how many people showed up. If more people showed up this year than last year, we won. If less people showed up, we lost. And gosh, that's a hard way to do ministry. Or an emotionally taxing way to do ministry. It might be strategically easy, but emotionally it's really hard.

Andrew Estes (40:14)

hahahaha

Yeah, yeah. Well, I love one of the things that you mentioned, like when you're talking about the five principles and it really is kind of this word that I hear pop up sometimes and people that are aware of it are people that are full on into this conversation And it really is just that word practitioner. And people like anytime I hear that word, I'm just like, all right, this brother, this sister, like they

they're full on aware of the disciple-making movement, that DMM conversation, that missional type of conversation where they're just not like hearers of the word, they don't just attention, they're actually doing something. I was talking with somebody not too long ago and was just sharing about four fields training and just how to share the gospel, how to share your faith and things like that, and just actually going out and doing some kinds of those things. And he just kind of looked at me and he's like, yeah, I'm a practitioner. ⁓

kind of clicks for me, I was like, ⁓ like this, this guy knows what I'm talking about, knows what we're doing. And it's full on engaged. And I'd love to just kind of get your take on why that word is so important in the midst of some of this stuff. So you talked to him in context, like being practitioners first, you talk about in practice, like the practitioners journey, rather than like kind of getting away from potentially the word disciple or discipleship and stuff like that, which is just

saturated the Christian community for forever. And it's not like it's a bad word, like it's an accurate word. But what shifts in you guys to be able to use that word practitioner?

Jacob Hoyer (41:59)

Yes, good. So for us, like we say mission is a practice to be cultivated. And so our, our, our organizational mission for Forge America is that we are, we are a network of practitioners cultivating practitioners who join in the everyday mission of God. So for us, that practice is the practice of joining in the everyday mission of God. But

to get at why we like that word, it's helpful to think about how else it gets used. So like you think about like a doctor has a medical practice, an attorney has a law practice. It's the trade that you apply. And then I would say like, ⁓ then okay, now even that I think people don't always have a key understanding of like, what does it mean that they have a medical practice? You think about it's a craft to be honed.

So, brother-in-law is a carpenter by training. And I remember ⁓ early on when his kid, his son and my other nephew are the same age. And one year for Christmas, he made them both a toy box out of beautiful wood with no metal, like no nails, no screws, just like well-crafted joinery. And then he used a,

a router to carve their name in it, right? It's like, holy moly. That's because he takes his craft seriously. And he like, he does it for work, he also does it for joy. So like spending time in the wood shop for him is him spending time on his craft and he enjoys that. And I think this is where like some of our mutual understanding of vocation comes in. So practice, craft.

vocation, I'm kind of talking about, it's like one thread here. But there is like, when we think about our jobs, if you go to work, and there's something you don't know how to do, what are you going to do? Figure out how to do it. Because your livelihood depends on I think we want to take the same thing into our vocation, generally our calling, our discipleship, our practice, the craft of mission and following Jesus is like,

If I don't know how to have a non-threatening conversation with my neighbor about Jesus, I should figure out how to do that. ⁓ You know, like, if I find every time I bring up Jesus with people, they run the other direction, I'm not doing it right. I should figure out how to do that. If that was my job, I would go figure it out. It is your job. it's like a part of who you're called to be is living out the mission of God in your everyday life. If you're struggling with that,

Andrew Estes (44:22)

Ha

Yeah. Right.

Jacob Hoyer (44:42)

there are some resources for you, we can help you, right? So that's what we mean by practice. It's something that it's a craft, it's something I'm applying myself to and getting better at. so that's why for us, practice and practitioner is a really helpful term because I think discipleship has come to mean people equate with education, unfortunately. And lots of communicators have tried over the last several decades to

shift that you know there's like you gotta follow Jesus so closely his dust gets on you or whatever for us we just find that talking about practitionership which i'm not sure is even a word because you can just say practice but we talk about practitionership ⁓ it's like it's something that that helps people get that that's right we gotta add syllables that's right that's yeah yeah yeah that's right that's right

Andrew Estes (45:26)

Because we're church leaders, man. We just make up stuff. That's good. Make it sound more smart. That's good.

Jacob Hoyer (45:35)

Yeah, so that's for us, that's kind of where practice lands. It's it's my craft that I'm honing, it's the vocation that I'm taking seriously, that kind of thing.

Andrew Estes (45:44)

The other aspect of that is just the training mindset that you mentioned as well. And we've talked about this in a number of different formats in some of our Nexus podcasts and some of the things that we've reframed, you know, even in the use of like the Bonhoeffer Project and helping pastors just reframe their understanding of the gospel and all these different kinds of conversations just coming at it from different angles and

is just so helpful for a lot of people to kind of recognize what that is. But when you're talking about the mentality of the Western mindset of just train them to think a different way and then maybe they'll behave a different way first, I'd love for you to just kind of dialogue a little bit more around that because I'm even thinking of, you know, one of our, people talk about like the learning pyramid where like our whole Sunday morning and like our whole church is oriented around this monologue on Sunday morning.

And when we think through just like neurologically, the way people learn, the way they change their behavior, the way they function, the way they move forward differently is so minimally effective when it's just auditory learning, like from just somebody like talking to them about the way they should live. And it's just a minimal implementation rather than somebody just like going along with them and training them how to do that. I mean, use the bike analogy.

previously, which is just a phenomenal analogy. I'd love for you to just unpack that even a little bit more. What is it about just the overemphasis of knowledge gathering in our current models that are just so addictive to us?

Jacob Hoyer (47:23)

well I think it begins in this belief that what saves people is right belief. So in church we think like what's our goal? Our goal is to get people saved. How do they get saved? By believing the right things. So let's teach it to them, I would say like, ⁓

without parsing it out completely, they were already saved when Jesus died on the cross, right? So it's not our job to save them. God already saved them. So now what's our job? Our job is to help them live in the kingdom. So the kingdom is here, and my job as a pastor is to help these people live in the kingdom.

And that's about them uncovering their calling and living into the practice of mission. And so I think, yeah, I think like the right belief part comes from, or the overemphasis on learning part comes from that infatuation with orthodoxy. was talking to somebody the other day about, I'd like advertise through clarity navigator that I would do a webinar and it ended up just me and one guy I already know.

But what I'd advertised was, why aren't people stepping up? Like, why can't you get enough volunteers in your church? And my answer to that was because you're trying to recruit them to run your programs and you're not telling them you can help them live their life. And most of them don't need another program to run. They're actually trying to figure out how to follow Jesus in their everyday life. And so the example I gave was like, there was a young woman that was a part of our church. She helped with the church plant. She was a kindergarten teacher.

And over time, she started to sense a calling and we talked this out over a couple of years to eventually work in administration. So she had an opportunity to maybe progress into being a vice principal, but she never really believed she was a leader. Once I knew this and like actually through Life Unique, I knew that her three year dream was to live into her identity as a leader. And so then I started looking for opportunities to have her help with our programs in a way that could help her hone her leadership gift.

So now, yeah, she was running programs, but in running the programs, I was helping her to discover what it means to lead so she could be a vice principal. Not so she could be a leader of church programs. That wasn't the point. The point was that she could be who she's called to be. And so now, this is where I tell people, like, they'll say, I'll say, everything we do is training you in your calling. And they'll say, ⁓ well, can I just go to a Bible study?

and I'll say, well yeah, we'll study the Bible together. But we'll study the Bible together so you can live into your calling. And so I think like sometimes it's viewed as an either or. And I've even had people in my church call me out, like, well, you just don't want to educate people. I'm like, no, I just want to educate them with purpose, not just with ideas.

And that is like Melinda, the volunteer sheriff's chaplain, we just had lunch yesterday and I told her she needs some theological education. Like the questions she's starting to ask and the things she's starting to do, I'm like, your life is just gonna be a lot easier if you go spend some intentional time settling some of these questions that you're wrestling with to decide what you believe or at least what questions you're comfortable with. So I do think there is an appropriate time and place for education, but not absent.

clarity on how I'm living out the kingdom in my everyday life.

Andrew Estes (50:37)

it's so powerful, just the whole ⁓ personal calling, like special calling, Younique conversation, because there's still a lot of the intentionality around just the actual general calling of like learning how to make a disciple. Like, how do we actually just have basic training of helping people learn to make a disciple? And it's funny sometimes because I have a friend

who's a missional guy who's been overseas for a long time and doing, like, multiplying disciples. And he talks about how in the West, like, we all want to know, like, our snowflake purpose and, like, all these different special things about how special we are. But at the same time, like, we have to teach them, like, basic fundamentals of what it means to actually take somebody through the scriptures and learn to live like Jesus did.

And it's not either or, it's not one or the other. It really is both together. just saying like, yes, there's basic training, but what is some of that special forces training almost of just saying like, how has God uniquely designed you? And I love being able to walk with people through the discovery of that and to really just step out of shame a lot of times. I mean, I feel like I felt that personally. know I've been able to walk with a lot of people through that of just like, man, God is

doing something special inside of you. And it helps with the comparison trap of just, you know, I'm not as smart as this person or I'm not as gifted as this person in this way or that way, but it really just brings a lot more joy to what they do, like regardless of what they do. And so it's a love that you guys are leaning more into that, especially in the context of this missional living.

Jacob Hoyer (52:16)

and I think that is, it's like, honestly, where I started to get fresh eyes for general calling, and in that we're saying like, every person has a special calling, we all have the same general calling to honor, others. Where I'm getting fresh eyes on general calling is as we go back to our children and youth curriculum in our congregation, we have a youth director who's moving away, and so we'll go back to volunteer-led, and so I'm like,

kind of redesigning how we talk about youth and children ministry. And as I do that, that's where I'm getting fresh eyes on like, yeah, we have to teach them the basics of the Bible narrative. We have to teach them what the 10 commandments are and the Lord's Prayer. And so there are some of those basics. I come from a Lutheran heritage, so Luther's small catechism is like a treasure of faith education. And so yeah, certainly those are foundational.

Andrew Estes (53:04)

that's good, Any last thoughts that you could leave our people with as you're considering these five principles? I mean, you mentioned a resource that you could give and I would love to be able to pass on that PDF or a link to it as people are considering just any way that we can approach this conversation towards shifting towards mission and being gospel-centered people. But any last thoughts, resources that you have for us?

Jacob Hoyer (53:30)

Yeah, the last encouragement, I'll give an encouragement and then I'll point to a couple of ways people can connect with resources. I think like as we've developed our new project, the Missional Culture Project, I've started to delineate like there are churches who because they've been in America the last 20 years, they go like, yeah, we're missional, but really what they're doing is just running a bunch of service programs and recruiting people to them. And so it still is attractional in that it's come to us and serve here in our programs.

And that might be working for you right now, but I think what we're beginning to find is people going like, wait a minute, I just added more to my plate. I'm just doing more of the same thing. And so that's where we talk about shifting to a missional mindset and that mobilizing people to live the mission of everyday life rather than just running more programs. So if you're a church that's going like, well, I thought we were missional, but gosh, it's a lot of work. And there's a lot of overhead, you know, maybe.

Andrew Estes (54:23)

You

Jacob Hoyer (54:27)

maybe what you've done is not necessarily get missional, but just get service oriented and you could reevaluate where you're at with a missional mindset. And so that's all, I've got a one page PDF I'll give to you, Andrew, that you can disseminate however you want. I'm currently developing a workbook and some journals around the five core principles that we're planning to have ready to roll out at Exponential in 2026. And so at expo, we'll do a pre-con, we do a pre-conference every year.

So if anybody's gonna be an exponential in Orlando, they can join us at our pre-conference. They'll get a free copy of that workbook and we'll do a train the trainer on all five core principles. And that I think we call the one thing missing from your next big thing, which the one thing missing is a missional mindset. So if anybody's gonna do a pre-conference at Expo, they could join us there and then they can find more at forgeamerica.com. And if you're interested in the missional culture project, which we're about to close applications for our next cohort. the...

This time next year we'll have applications open for the cohort that will launch the next summer. That's at forgeamerica.com slash culture.

Andrew Estes (55:28)

Awesome. Well, dude, thank you so much for just the opportunity to connect and just to dialogue around some of this stuff. I love what you guys are doing just around the five principles, mission, context, community formation and practice. And it's just so needed for a lot of churches. So just to get out of the rat race and just the whirlwind of life and ministry and just to get back on mission to align everything that we do for the kingdom and for kingdom purposes.

Jacob, thank you so much for your time today, man. Appreciate you joining us.

Jacob Hoyer (55:57)

Yeah, thank you,

Andrew. This was great.