12 Andrew Estes | ThinkNEXT Session 6

Andrew Estes (00:14)

Welcome back to the Nexus Church Planting Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Estes.

Twice a year, we gather leaders from across our network for an event we call ThinkNEXT It's a time to step back from the pace of ministry, connect with like-minded leaders, and refocus on the mission of making disciples who make

This episode comes from our most recent ThinkNEXT gathering. Our theme was From Maintenance to Multiplication, Reframing Your Mindset to Allow the Gospel to Replicate. Together, we explored how the gospel spreads not through complexity or control, but through simple reproducible practices that ordinary believers can pass on from day one. We hope this session encourages you and challenges you to help you lead your church toward multiplication.

Let's jump in to today's session.

Nexus: Church Planting & Leader Care (01:06)

One of the nexus values, one of our other values, is this idea of risk-taking faith.

to run with scissors, as it were. And oftentimes we, you know, that's just kind of a laughing thing. You have to explain it any time. Like, why would you do that? That seems really stupid. Well, yeah, church planting is very risky sometimes. And that's what it feels like, is that we're running with scissors, hoping nothing bad happens, right? But oftentimes, sometimes that actually happens. And so, just a question, because sometimes we start out really, really strong in church planting and risk taking and the courage and the mastery

of

faith that it takes to go and move maybe to a different city and do something huge like this. I had the opportunity to attend Traverse Christian Church's 10-year anniversary that they just sell or Traversary as they called it. The 10-year Traversary just a few weeks ago and so that was a lot of fun be able to celebrate with a lot of you guys know Patrick Lightfoot, Caleb Garrison. They couldn't be here this time so it was a little bit of bummer but they hired a new children's gal whose husband

does those drone shows for his job? Like, has anybody seen one of those before, where they send up like 50, 150 different drones and they'll do maybe even like a fireworks display ⁓ with drones or something like that? Well... ⁓

The gal who they just hired at their church, her husband does that, starting up his new company and a couple of businesses from the church sponsored the rest of what it would cost to be able to do something like that. And they did this drone show at the end of this celebration night. And one of their values that they totally stole from Nexus was run with scissors. So this is 300 foot scissors up in the air chopping up whatever that building is across the street from their new facility.

of how big are your scissors? I remember watching at the grand opening of their facility, you get those big scissors and chomp off of that, ribbon that you have in front of you, into that ribbon cutting ceremony to be able to go through certain things. And so we wanna talk to you guys a little bit just about risk taking, risk taking faith. Why is it that we often take bold steps

like planting churches and then turn right around and often just play it safe and get complacent.

and not even just in church planting and in church planting leadership, but in so many different areas of our life where we feel like we step out in courage, we step out in faith and do these big bold moves, whatever it is that God's calling us to, and then very quickly kind of shrink back in ways that maybe even surprise ourselves. We end up running with shears to start out and then we end up with those little toddler scissors before too long, right? And so one of the stories that Phil shares in one of the online

courses or one of the online videos that we do for people preparing to get into the art of the start was this story about 350 years ago, a shipload of travelers landed in the northeast coast of America. In the first year, they established a town site. In the second year, they elected a town government. In the third year, the town government planned to build a road five miles westward into the wilderness.

In the fourth year, the people tried to impeach the town officials because they thought it was a waste of public funds to build a road five miles westward into the wilderness. Who needs to go there anyway? Here were people who had a vision.

big enough to cross the sea of 3000 miles, this huge ocean and the determination enough to overcome great hardships, but in just a few short years, they were not able to see even five miles out of town. They had lost their pioneering vision. So Phil teaches a little bit of this story in the session, beginning with the end in mind. So we have large,

compelling kingdom, God-sized visions that have led you to the point to where you guys are at, to launching a church, to being a part of a church, being, aiding and assisting and working diligently for the kingdom in whatever corner of the world that you guys are at. And some of the times we just get caught up in.

some of that playing it safe, where we'll step out in faith and do these massive risks. And it doesn't even have to be big organizational type of things. It could be, I shared my faith with somebody today, and then the next week I just get afraid. What is it about that? What causes people and organizations and churches to embark on adventurous journeys, only to then settle and remain comfortable? And you'll hear stories about this.

literally all over the place. So any type of leadership books, which is what I was immersed in over the last couple of years as I was doing some schoolwork on that, like the story of Kodak, right? That's just kind of a staple when we think about stuff like this. So Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975. Their own engineers saw the future clearly, but the leadership suppressed it because it was a threat to their film business, right? And so they protected what made them successful, which was that innovation, that drive.

drive

the new and better images. then Kodak files for bankruptcy in 2012.

or stories like Blockbuster, right, who were unable to make the pivot towards streaming. And because of all of their brick and mortar and all the different things, a huge part of their revenue came from late fees from everybody forgetting to return their videos, right. So they couldn't make that shift. ⁓ Blackberry was another one. When we had the phones with the full on keyboards in front of there and if you had fat fingers, you were just out of luck. But if you had a big Blackberry, they had the market on all of that for a while until the iPhone and they neglected

to be able to make that shift into the fully digital space because they still depended on their hardware. Maybe the story of Garmin. Remember like Garmin, like the thing that you would have in your, it was just the maps type of a thing. I remember listening to a story from one of Simon Sinek's books, either Start With Why or The Infinite Game, one of those two books where he was talking about the story of Garmin and how none of us would be surprised if today the primary navigation app on your phone was a Garmin app.

Right? None of us would have been surprised by that 20 years ago, but they were committed to their hardware and they neglected to really take the risk and move solely into that software space of developing the apps around some of those things. And so just people that were doing immensely difficult and challenging even faith driven things.

And then finally, once they got established and all these different things and nailed down their identity, they neglected to be able to continue to take risks moving forward. You can just look at the biblical story of, I mean, it's always easy to pick on Peter, right? Everybody's gotta pick on Peter, but being able to see the story of Peter stepping out of the boat for the first time and doing something immense and miraculous and as soon as starts walking towards Jesus and then fears that he's going to be overtaken,

after he's already experienced some of the success of doing something that no other human other than Jesus had ever done before. But immediately fear overtakes him and begins to sink.

Right, it's just this idea because, and it's even amazing just to even think of the faith that Peter had because he had already experienced having when Jesus sends out the 12 and when Jesus sends out the 72 that he had given them power and authority to do immeasurable things, like just remarkable things, casting out demons and all these, know, and just even the story of the disciples of just like, hey, do you want us to like call down fire on them real quick? Just the things that they believed that they

just because of what Jesus had given to them. And so they watched Jesus do something and then he gave them power and authority to be able to do exactly what he did. So as soon as Peter saw Jesus walking, he's like, I guess I could probably do that. Like, call me out to you. And then starts doing these crazy things, but then immediately gets overwhelmed after the success that he'd already had and then taken under.

You know, you see Peter even later in scripture and we could go from that point and all of the incredible things and the healings and the messages and the preaching sermons that he does and all of the great works, but then you see this interaction with him with Paul and Galatians where he shrinks back because of his fear for the circumcised group, right? What is that about us?

where we can have those moments of running with shears and then we just shrink back to some of those fears. We have large vision for what God has actually called us to and to do these big great works, but then sometimes there's a mindset shift or a limiting belief or something about something that happens in our hearts that just kind of wrestles with that. There's this book called Beyond High Performance. ⁓

that is just a remarkable book, fantastic book, great read. If you want another commercial about it, go talk to John Honnold. It's like one of his favorite books now. I recommended to him a few years ago. Just raving about it the other night at dinner. But this simple idea of how do you relate to the gap?

Anytime we cast a vision, anytime we feel some calling, anytime we have some greater thing that we are pursuing, we have that long range dream or that short range goal or whatever it is, but we have our current reality. And then there's this gap that is always created by where we wanna go and where we currently are and how you relate to that gap is pretty substantial. So as soon as you create that vision, you create that gap. And there's three tactics that oftentimes people will employ

to try to decrease that gap. And the first one is to maybe settle.

Right, to make that vision feeling that maybe it feels unattainable, maybe getting to the point of actually accomplishing it when you said you were gonna accomplish it, maybe whatever number that you had set out there just doesn't feel quite right. So we start to reduce our vision or our long range goal to get a little bit closer to our reality to make it feel a little bit more manageable. Man, I don't think we can accomplish that by X date. Maybe we need to push the date or maybe we need to rethink what we're doing. So we try and shrink that.

That makes sense. The second way that we do it is try to inflate our sense of reality. Anybody know somebody like this where it's just like, you know, we're not that bad. Everything's going great. It's all good. It's all gravy, right? You you have just those eternal optimists that just have no real bearing on what reality actually looks like. My wife calls me a pessimist. I tend to think of myself as a realist, but that is just that mindset is that we tend to decrease the gap.

by inflating our current reality. And this helps us feel like we're moving towards the gap superficially. We tend to romanticize our current situation. Our minds have a propensity to exaggerate things in order to feel like we're growing when we're actually not. And then the third way that we often engage that or try and decrease the gap is actually decreasing the gap.

of moving bravely into some kind of space where we feel like this is the kind of person I wanna be, the kind of church I wanna be, the kind of team I wanna be, and actually doing the difficult work of moving towards what that is. Oftentimes,

We have to ask that question. And I love that Raleigh mentioned the idea around 10,000 if he's in the room earlier this morning. like it's a Malcolm Gladwellism where 10,000 hours and you become an expert at something. Somebody else told me that we on average you will spend 100,000 hours at work.

and whatever kind of work that you end up doing in life. 100,000 hours, so if it takes 10,000 hours to get really good at something, what are you doing for the other 90,000 hours? And just being able to, rather than just ask the question, how can I be the best at something or how can I be good at something or great at something, asking the simple question that exposes or just opens up possibilities by saying, what am I actually capable of? Or what are we actually capable of in this season, in this time?

with our team, with our church, in our marriage, whatever that looks like. And so there's this other tool in the book, Beyond High Performance, that they call the intuitive fence. Now imagine there was a barrier or a fence around your life created by your intuition of what you believed was possible or impossible for your future.

Things that fall inside the fence we feel are much more possible. Things that fall outside the fence we deem as impossible for us. Generally, if our intuition tells us something is impossible, we tend to actually listen to it. If we think it's impossible, it automatically is impossible. Greg Garcia used to say there's faith, there's miracles, and then it ain't gonna happen, right? And so we have to continually push and test and try and discern whether it's

our faith or just our intuition, like how can we really push beyond what we really think is possible in our current scenario? So here's just really practical how it works. So the closer that you get to the center of the whole fence, which is that big circle, the more possible things occur to you. So if I were to say like making $1,000 this next year, like that would seem extremely possible for almost all of us, right? Maybe not for my children, they're only six years old, that might seem extremely

incredibly impossible for us, it might be that way. So it seems very possible to us. But as that number continues to grow, 10,000, 100,000, a ⁓ million dollars, right? Whatever that is. And it could be your financial situation, it could be your personal health, it could be your spiritual growth, it could be any number of different things personally, or even as your church kind of navigates, what kind of dream, what kind of vision are you chasing after?

there tends to be a line that you bump up against that oftentimes triggers, and what they call that is your blame reflex in their coaching model. So it's this blame reflex that sounds a lot like that'll never work. That can't happen.

He or she or they, they'll never go for it. The board would never go for it. Your wife would never go for it. That's actually impossible. That's never been done before. We've never done it that way. Someone is already doing it. I don't have time for that, right? All of these limiting beliefs and different things that just kind of creep into our mindset and creep into what limits us based on what we feel is possible.

And so we constantly have to be pushing up against that to ask the question because good coaching intentionally triggers that reflex so that we can confront that mindset or even confront that step of faith in a very intentional way. Often our mindset, our limited faith, our fear that keeps us in a mode of protection, of self-preservation. And that kind of goes back to all of those stories, whether it's a Kodak or a Blockbuster or your church or whatever it is that you faced in your own life

you feel some measure of success, end up...

being comfortable in the success and now you have something to lose, right? Because early on when you're launching something, I ain't got nothing to lose. I lost all shame in church planting for asking anybody for anything. Like, you wanna give me money? You wanna give me a free thing? You wanna give me this? Do you have a nonprofit discount? I mean, just literally any way that I could just go out and do certain things, which is probably good and maybe a little bit bad at the same time. But being able to have that type of a posture versus, ⁓ that's not gonna work.

that's never gonna happen. Even if I tried it, it probably wouldn't work out. And we have to battle against that and remove kind of that fear of failure. And so I think of so many different stories when it comes up against like failing, not being afraid of failure, to take a risk, to run with scissors, to have that risk taking faith and not be afraid of failure. Has anybody seen that Pete Sampras kind of college address, I forget where

actually did a piece Ampers famous tennis player and he talks a lot about what separates kind of the top 50 or 100 tennis players from the top like five or six and he said some crazy statistic like the top tennis players in the in the world win just over 50 % of the points that they play

So they have to so they'll go out and do some some crazy smash that ends up on the ESPN top 100 or top 10 list. And that's he's just like, that's just a point. You might have this epic win. And that's just a point. You may have lost a crazy point. And that's just a point. And you have to forget about it and move on. And he talks about this idea of very quickly being able to move on from failure is what separates good tennis players from great tennis players. I was listening to a podcast on failure more recently.

⁓ scientists and inventors fail 90 % of the time, but they live for that 10%.

They're just, everything that they do, like nine times out of 10, everything that they are doing is failure, failure, failure, not working, not working, not working until they get to that one thing and that just breathes life into their sails and they move into that. I forget the exact Edison quote, but he found Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb. He said after, does anybody know the number of that he tried?

almost 200, it was a whole bunch of times. He's like, I didn't fail 200 times, I found out 200 ways not to make a light bulb. And it was just this mindset shift that he had to overcome. And so I want to just offer you guys an opportunity to reflect right now, just personal reflection. I just wanna give you guys a couple of minutes.

not to talk about it at your tables, but just to reflect right now, where might you be protecting something instead of advancing something? Like what have you been maybe avoiding or postponing? Or what is a next step based on maybe your personal vision, maybe based on the vision of the church or the organization that you're a part of, even the business that you are a part of or own? Is there something that is just been there, you know you need to step out, you know you need to do that hard conversation.

to get into some kind of a hard financial investment? Maybe you need to do something physically for your own health. Maybe you need to share your faith with X number of people, whatever it is. Have that, again, have a hard conversation with somebody, whether it's in your family, in your workplace, in your church. Is there something going on in you right now that you're just shying away from?

One thing we talk about in nexus sometimes is that we'll see people with enough faith to move across the country or move from city to city and invite people to go with them and raise a whole bunch of money and they do this grand epic things and then they're terrified to move from one to two services or move a facility, go from this place to this place or whatever it might be.

Real quick, I wanna just give you guys a second. Think about a time when you took a bold step of faith. What was it that gave you courage in that moment to step out and to do something courageous that you feel like God was leading you to?

Think about a time when you had to take some bold step of faith. doesn't even, it could be something as practical as, I shared my faith with the gas attendant at the gas station or whatever it might be, or I invited a neighbor over or we planted a church. I mean, it could be big things like that. But is there some kind of thing where it's like, man, I took a risk and this is what gave me the courage to do that? Talk about that for a second.

As we kind of wrap for some of our session for yesterday and today, even thinking about some of the disciple making conversation that happens with just all the stuff that Roy talked about, all the different things that you already came into this room carrying, all of the different aspects of taking risks and intentionality behind that. What is one risk?

or one thing that you could intentionally step into this week? What is one risk you sense God inviting you toward that you've been hesitating to take? What is a step, I love this, what step have you been praying about for a while? Right, you guys know what I'm saying? It was like, oh, I'll pray about that. I'll pray about that. You know, I'm just, I'm thinking, I'm feeling it out. I'll pray about it. You're just avoiding it is really what's happening, right? Can we be honest about that? What is one thing?

Could be in your health, could be your spiritual life, could be in your finances, could be in your organization, could be in your leadership, could be in your just intellectual pursuit. Maybe it's going to school again, maybe it's reading that book, maybe it's whatever it could be, writing that book. What is one thing that you're just putting off as you think about taking risks? Oftentimes we have the courage to move.

from city to city to do bold steps or to walk on water. And then immediately we get into that risk of loss. We have that safety. Now we have something to lose. How can we still be like Brandon was talking about, open-handed with our church and still be willing to risk more?

Nexus: Church Planting & Le... (23:54)

Thank you for checking out the Nexus Church Planting Podcast. We hope this conversation was helpful and inspires you to lean deeper into your calling. If you want to learn more about Nexus, visit us at nexus.us. There you'll find church planting resources, upcoming trainings, events, and more. We also want to encourage you to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Leave a review or rating to help others find us.

And please share this episode with someone you know, a pastor, a leader, a friend, somebody who needs to hear this conversation. And until next time, move with vision, lead with courage, and multiply the kingdom.