Justin Forman Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. It is great to be back home after many weeks on the road over this fall and of summer. It’s always good to travel and see what God’s doing around the world. And you know, there’s fun sliding door moments of life that you experience. And today is one of those fun moments where we get to connect a couple of those. I often say that conferences can be catalytic experiences. And you know, one of those for me, some great friend of the Christian Economic Forum. Just a great event. Or leaders gather every year just to talk about some of the world’s greatest problems and what can we do as believers to step into those moments and to tackle those. And so a couple of years ago, I had a chance to to be a part of it. And one of the things I love that Chuck Bentley does is puts people in smaller groups, in smaller groups where conversations can go deeper. And it’s not just exchanging business cards and quick updates, but you really get a chance to really speak into each other’s lives. And on that time, I got a chance to connect with Dan. And Dan has just had just incredible experience of of connecting what entrepreneurs are doing and serving as a part of this movement. And thrilled to have him here as a co-host with us for the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast Sudan. And as we say often on the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast, who are you? Where do you come from? Tell everybody a little bit about your story and how these dots connect.

Dan Owolabi Sure, sure. Yeah. Neal It’s good to be on here. Yeah. Justin, I remember the first time we met at Beaver Creek. You know, one of the most impactful things you said it was that of all the things you’re doing in the world you were coaching, I think it was the Pixie Chicks, your daughters ball team, which was absolutely impressive. So I just can’t forget it.

Justin Forman You know, it’s a fierce team, Fierce team. You know, I don’t coordinate the wardrobe. I just coach the sidelines. But man, yeah, some fun moments with the kids.

Dan Owolabi It’s been fun to just listen to how they’ve done over the years, so. But yeah, know about me. So I lead an organization called Branches Worldwide. We work with Christian entrepreneurs, executives and CEOs around the world helping build businesses designed to bless and benefit their communities. So a lot of ways we’re we’re a consulting company in a lot of ways. We’re a community or really try to bring people along and help them sort of go further, faster. One big element of what we do is we work with our nonprofit arm. We work with 30 entrepreneurs in 30 countries. Then we work with them from 30 years. It’s like a long term partnership. We really help them go deep in their communities so they can bring about long term kingdom transformation. So it’s a lot of fun. As the nonprofit for profit arm, we do a lot of consulting on that side to get a wife and two kids, two little girls, my wife another married for 17 years, which is a lot of fun, and she still kicks my butt at Ping-Pong. And that’s one of the reasons why I love her, because she does not ever let me win. So there you go. It’s a ton of fun.

Justin Forman All right. So where’s the coaching career in your future are we have a little Pixie six team forming and we got basketball. What are we going after?

Dan Owolabi Maybe. Yes. So I am I am literally like probably one year away from finishing a doctor. So I am I’m pushing hard towards that. But when that’s done, I’m going to go into full time, well, part time coaching for my girls and maybe do a little bit basketball for them. A little bit of soccer. Looking forward to it. Sure. Yeah.

Justin Forman Well, thrilled to have Dan, you’re going to be helping cohost a couple of different episodes in the months to come. And so just really loving that perspective. I think one of the things that I’ve always appreciated most about your perspective, Dan, and just kind of you outlined it right, there is a long term commitment. I mean, that’s not something that’s common in this movement and conversation is to really roll up the sleeves and think, man, how do we work with a defined group of people for a long period of time? But we can see that in Scripture. We can see that model played out. We can see so much of what that’s like. And I love, love, love, love that long term vision that you have. For that, I want to introduce our guest here for today and talking about sliding to her moments of life for me 20 years ago had an incredible experience to go around the world in about 40 days and just see God at work. And I turned that experience into a video series that ended up being a curriculum. And one of the pastors and teachers that was a part of that was Chip Chip Ingram. And so has just been a joy my life. I just over the last 20 years getting to know Chip more and just seeing just the faithfulness and the journey. So Chip, welcome back to the podcast. I think this might be the second or third time, but great having you back with us.

Chip Ingram Thanks. Good to be with you. Justin and Dan Love what you’re doing. It’s great to meet you.

Justin Forman Well, you know, one of the things that we all had in common is we all three of us had a chance to be a part of listen. And there is a deep, rich history, just an event and a conference there that has brought together. I think this year was probably all it was 204 different countries there, about 5400 different leaders around the world that had a chance to come together in Seoul, Korea, and really both encourage one another but challenge each other about what is happening in the church. And so I’d love to start there. Maybe we’ll start with Chip. What were some of the things that you took away from that? What were some of the things as spending the week there in Seoul that you took away from the experience?

Chip Ingram 2 or 3 things are top of mind. One compared to least the lesson of eight years ago. I wasn’t there, but I kind of read the research. The number of workplace leaders was astronomically greater. I mean, it was a focus. It was like a huge group instead of, you know, pastors and leaders. Let’s get together and we’ll look at the world. And and by the way, yeah, there’s some things happening in the workplace. It was a. It was an acknowledgment that the great Commission will be accomplished. It’s not going to happen just through the ministries of local churches. It’ll be through the ministries of expanded the members of local churches. It’s God’s people. And that perhaps, you know, in the words of Billy Graham, that the next great movement is going to happen through the workplace. So that was really encouraging to see that. The second encouraging thing was the youth, you know, 40 and under 35 and under from all around the world. You know, you hear so many God’s raising up people. That was encouraging. And honestly, this may sound negative, but the fact that at the end of the one in South Africa, the number one need in the world, the number one need, you know, all this research was discipleship. Eight years later, the number one need in the world. So I think it’s positive for organizations to actually own. Guess what? The ball has not moved. We’re not doing well. You can’t make positive growth unless you have a benchmark, unless you’re honest. And to me, it was positive that it wasn’t glossed over, that it was like, you know what? We learned a lot because getting people to come to a weekend service, spiritual programs, spiritual activities, they all may have a place, but none of those translate into Christians living like Christians and being all in where they go to work, realizing I’m God’s ambassador. Yeah, I live in the Silicon Valley. Many, many people that are in my world are like, I am the only believer I know of in the top floor of Adobe or this entire section of Google or over here at Apple. And God’s doing some really exciting things. And I think that was encouraging because you can’t change what you don’t acknowledge.

Justin Forman I mean, there’s so much there, Chip, and I think we’re gonna get to unpacking some of that. I love what you’re talking about. It’s like we have to have the responsibility to admit the moment and to admit what’s happened and what hasn’t happened. I think David Platt has talked about this thing of one of the early losses on events when he talks about unreached people groups and how big of a thing was. And here we are decades later, still talking about some of those same things. And I think you’re talking about a core of discipleship that together it’s not just on the pastor, the whole church, our strategy, our effectiveness of some of this, it’s lost some of it. What stops us from admitting that? What stops us from admitting the broken you?

Chip Ingram I think part of it is I’m sure entrepreneurs never struggle with this, but being a pastor for not quite 40 years, when your identity is wrapped around the paradigm that you believed in and developed and you find out that what how you measure success is literally the ladder on the wrong wall is that, you know, Covid ripped away. And I think it was like watching the roof come off of a building. But except it was the whole church and God and the spirit of God look down upon all of these local expressions. And we were measuring how many people showed up, whether we had a building or not, and how much money came in. And we made those are little checkmarks we can always verbalize. It’s much more important. It’s about life change, it’s about discipleship, blah, blah, blah, blah. But when you took that away, what you saw was by and large and I know I don’t want to sound negative, but by and large it was whether you open the church or didn’t open the church, whether you wore a mask or didn’t wear a mask, whether you were blue state or red state, and whether you would take the vaccine or not take the vaccine, those four things were more important than Jesus, more important than mission and more important and what we’re called to do. And so it’s broken. And so I think I think we’re seeing a lot of pastors see that some are trying to rebuild what they had and they’re finding it’s not going well. There’s a reason why people aren’t coming back to church. Others have seen, you know what, this is the greatest opportunity in the last hundred years. And disruption provides an opportunity for new paradigms, new growth. In fact, you know, all of our VC friends, what are they? What are their all about? They’re looking for the idea that the disruption is going to break out. We have that opportunity right now, and I think one of the paradigm shifts will be that may come through the workforce way faster than it does the church. The problem, you know, you said, why don’t we change if you keep funding something and if you keep the structures moving, there’s not a lot of motivation to change. That’s changing. Now, churches, I don’t know how many thousand it is a month that are shutting down. I read 1500 pastors a week or a month. They’re leaving the ministry. There’s all these little dots that we don’t see and we’re going to have, you know, sort of that Hemingway experience where they ask anymore, you know, how did how did you go broke? And he said very, very, very slowly that all I want the little ones. And I think we’re going to we’re seeing that in the church. But simultaneously, I think it’s like, you know, if you want to how do you want to look at the glass? Is God still on the throne? Have his purposes changed? Are the longings and the power of the spirit as available now as they’ve ever been? The key is going to be leadership, and I think that is allowing young leaders to have the freedom. And I think for some of us that are older is building bridges to some of the institutional places to say, hey, guys, can we just own. You know, rather, we all want to protect our image, our reputation we just own on our watch. A lot of not good things happened. And why don’t we be a part of what God wants to do in the future? And some of it is, you know, it’s not so much a willful thing if you believe I mean, I live this world. I mean. Probably until 20 years ago as a pastor, If a lot of people showed up on the weekend, I was a happy guy. Not very many people showed up. I was not a very happy guy. Yeah. And if it wasn’t for the discipleship focus that I had way before I went to seminary, I mean, the whole system is aligned to produce and to train for something that’s not necessarily the outcome that God wants. And as Dan said, that’s a big generational thing. But you can either get discouraged by that or realize, hey. You know what? Things are going to change. Yeah. Now which ideology is going to win and who captures the heart of the next generation and my experiences. You know, as long as you keep faking it and making excuses, people write you off. The moment you can say, look. We’re going to own it. We messed up. This was the problem. It’s still the problem. And we’re not going to keep doing the same old thing to get the same old results. So I think it’s I think there’s a lot of potential, but I don’t think it’s going to be an easy, easy run. And I’m not sure, you know, we’re going to run the same offense, if you will, for the church as we’ve run in the past. I think there’s a reason Faith driven entrepreneurs has blown up that there’s been such a movement again. Some guy just e-mailed me last week. I think he thinks I’m I got to write a chapter two for Henry’s book. So he somehow thinks I’m way more on the inside than ever. I just know you guys. I don’t know anything about that. I’m a pastor, right? And he writes me and thanks me goes. I just joined my first group. I just went through the first three times. I’ve been lonely. I’ve been out there. Old shit. Thank you so very much. I think it Well heard that. Thanks. You know, I really had almost nothing to do with it, But what you’re seeing is new paradigm, new focused. What? What do you do? You get him in community. You’re helping Dan? I mean, that’s what you’re doing. You’re coaching them to understand the integrated life and the calling of God and using your gifts to make a huge difference.

Dan Owolabi Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s fantastic. Yep. I mean, I love your optimism. You’re going to enjoy it. It’s fantastic. And I think which is what you’re saying is that oftentimes when there’s a crisis, everybody knows that we’re in a crisis. Like, you know, Justin, you’re saying people don’t often admit 100% true. But I think in the back of everybody’s minds, we’ve been talking about the decline of the church, especially in America, for like 30 years, you know, the long time. And it just keeps happening. But I think the next generation, they see that as an opportunity. You know, they realize there’s nobody that they have the weight on. They don’t win on permission. They can just make things happen. Because clearly the old plays, like you said, those aren’t working. So now we can step up and just write the next generation of place. So I think there’s a lot of optimism, a lot of hope. And I think the integration between what you’re seeing in the church and then the opportunity that Faith driven entrepreneurs presented is it’s really giving people for you, Christians and love making new things out of nothing. It’s giving them all it’s giving them an opportunity. It said, Hey, look, the future is unwritten. God is really sort of leaning into people who want to make things happen as opposed to sort of, you know, running the old place. So I think that’s a great opportunity for everybody right now. I love the energy behind.

Chip Ingram And just so what I’d say is I think, you know, as a pastor with an old paradigm, when you read and, you know, I take all these statistics with a, you know, plus or -5 or 10% or a professor who knows what true, you know, 41% knows. And boy, yeah, you know, like, yeah, who knows? But I think the thing is when you hear all these people are going to a local expression of the church, please don’t hear these people aren’t walking with God anymore. These people don’t care about God anymore. Is it a salad bar approach? And I might listen to this person online or that person online. What it’s saying, as much as anything is, is the current expression, it’s 85% and there’s wonderful exceptions. Okay. This is not bashing church. I mean, I’m a pastor. There’s wonderful exceptions. But if you just drove by and saw all ten buildings, 8.5 of them are not going in a good direction. They’re not life giving. They’re not making progress. They’re not something that the average young person wants to come to. But when you look at the number of people who voted with their feet, what they’re saying is, I want to walk with God. Many of them. Yes, there’s some deconstructing and there’s some playing a lot more golf than they used to, granted. But there’s a whole lot of people that are saying, you know what, I’m looking for a place that I can connect. I’m looking for a place where this is real, that we’re doing something and I want God to give me direction, purpose and use my life. Yeah, If I can find 3 or 4 other couples to do that, if I could find a group of single people that were committed to doing that is not going to show up on the charts. But that’s where the real life change is happening in America, and especially Southeast Asia. The people that I partnered with, I’ve got a friend who has 240,000 routes out of their local church because he focused on discipleship early on, and now they’re all around the world. His biggest problem is how do I transcend my culture? Because because they’re all the same ethnic background that it’s happening. And that’s. Yeah. I see that as the future.

Dan Owolabi That’s what I think.

Justin Forman I think he’s really fascinating. We talk about scarcity as the mother of all invention and we talk about just the innovation. We talk about the appetite that there Dan’s talked about. You’ve got a people group. You’re ready primed for this moment. We heard about this in the conference here is David Platt was talking about just it just so happens in this moment there is a people primed ready for this. And I think that, you know, one of the things that was new to me was just flipping the curse of like we what we often talk about incremental growth and I think established models, oftentimes when we talk about it, it’s like, yeah, can you get 3%, 4%, 5%, 6%? You tweak, can you fight off a little bit of a decrease? But when you flip it, there’s just as moment we’re just incredible invention innovation. A curve just opens up. And you know I was talking to a pastor and just off the cuff, we’re just thinking, man, I was like, what if I could tell you that you could, you know, grow your church staff and the impact kind of like a church staff caliber level leader text. And what if I could tell you that the people that would be joining your team would be rock stars of the city? They’re already entrenched. Their place. They’re all over there. They’re in the fabric of your community. And they have twice as much trust or they’re being looked to twice as much as maybe the churches. And by the way, all that’s funded. Think when you think about it that way and you think about that moment. It is, as you said, threatening to scoreboards and structures and models, but it’s so in line with the mission. Then what does it take for us to, like, flip that scoreboard? Because, like, these are hard things to measure, but like, how do we flip the scoreboard to measure the right things so that because when you do that, like all of a sudden the method, the older method or the method of what we’ve been using and counting cars in a parking lot, I mean, that starts to change really fast. How do we get to a new scoreboard?

Chip Ingram Well, you have to change, first of all, your metric, right? You always get what you celebrate, right? I mean, you know, if you just every business. What what do you measure? You know? And I think what business has the great gift of is that, you know, you don’t have the ability to not make a profit and not be successful with your customers for years and years and years. And the business keep going on. The church has done it. And I think to flip the script for us, because we work with pastors and some business leaders, but not like you all in the business world at that level. But what we’ve done with pastors that help them say, you know what? Success is not how many people come to the weekend service. Ephesians four says your goal is to equip people when they walk out of the service. So stop measuring or being so focused on how many. They start asking what kind. So we walk with them and say, here’s here’s a profile biblically of the what kind of person you want to develop, and let’s come up with very specific strategies to help people become that kind of a follower of Christ. Then let’s give them a simple, reproducible pathway that they become self feeders and they get from other people and discover what their mission is. Part of the challenge of the Church of flipping the script is kind of, I would say, though, being a pastor and I’m an entrepreneur. And so what what I got finally and I learned this from my time in the Silicon Valley was where I’ve gone. The churches have grown very, very large and they’ve had a lot of impact. It’s not because I mean, I have some communication gift. I know that I’ve got some leadership gift, but that’s not it. We flipped the script and said, I told our staff, no one gets big stars on the fridge rater for how many people come to your group? The the people here are smarter than us. They have a context better than us. They have leadership better than us. We’re going to help all the people in the church figure out what God gave them and where their passions are. And we’re going to help them be successful in launching their ministries, in their companies, their neighborhoods, their sports teams, their business. And as we did that, well, what do I do? Producers do? I mean, if they didn’t have enough money for the for the big business deal, one guy did a breakfast once a month. What he paid for it. He got other people to if they didn’t have enough volunteers, they recruited people for it. What we finally did said, we said instead of trying to get people to come and you as the pastor were, you helped me build my kingdom. We helped me fulfill this vision that I have inside of my head. And I need you to come so often and volunteer so often and give you time and give your money. And then we and we measure success by, we got a bowling alley and a climbing wall and everyone uses Christian toothpaste. I’m being mildly facetious. Instead of saying, wait a second, whether we had space or building or whatever. All we really need is we need a place to meet to help you develop. We need people to coordinate, to meet all around the city. And we need to help you discover how God made you who you really are in Christ. And He’s giving you a purpose and a mission that no one in the world has quite like you. Our dream, our hope is to make you successful when you. That’s the flipping of the script. But it’s actually an old script. And the old script is he gave some of the policies, some that prompted some of the evangelists, some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the believers of the saints to build up in the body of Christ until we all go to big meetings and discuss Jesus. But until we are conformed to the image of the Son of God, Christ likeness. That’s that’s the goal. Now, I had a boss, a mom, a dad, a friend, a supervisor, fellow worker. That’s a lot like Jesus. And does that change the world?

Justin Forman Yeah. I love that. I love the experience that God’s giving you, Chip in terms of especially in the Valley, just talking about people that if you had put the box too tight, if you had made the program a check box, they would have said no. But you have to give them space because that’s what attracts entrepreneurs. It’s not better. It’s just different. And I think that that’s one of the things kind of coming back to our conversations of being it was on that I appreciate is the past 20 years there was this urging of trying to give the faith and work conversation a place, a seat at the table, and now there’s a seat at the table. But the conversation has to go deeper. It has to make sure that there’s a difference between the person that’s working in the corner office and maybe something the cubicle not better, to be clear, not better, just different. The application that we’re being called to is different. And I want to turn to Dan to speak to some of this, but before I do, I want to just kind of inject some statistics because, you know, Tip is talking about stats and everything, but one of the fun things that we’ve been able to do is spend some time with Barna, David Kinnaman and some guys researching what are the differences between pastor and entrepreneur and people in the pew of the church. There’s three different perspectives and some early statistics that we’re coming back to us that we’re going to share in some upcoming events. But some of these are fascinating. 91% of entrepreneurs feel purposeful in their work. The 4% say their work uses their gifts. When we talk about that, when we talk about entrepreneurs, we’re talking about two different people, because oftentimes I think we’re guilty of getting up there on Sunday.

Dan Owolabi Morning.

Justin Forman And giving a sermon that says all your work’s terrible. I know, but love through it in Jesus name. But yet there is a segment of people inside of that that feel incredibly called, incredibly intentional and exactly for the place that they’re supposed to be. So, Dan, in your experiences, you’ve been working with these 30 entrepreneurs to speak to that. What are we missing? What’s the church missing as we’re calling out the differences between these entrepreneurs and everybody in the church? How are they different from everybody else?

Dan Owolabi Yeah. You know, I love that you’re bringing that statistic to the table, Justin, because I think when you think about entrepreneurs, you think about people who who love to surgery, love chaos, love things that are undefined. They love, you know, pioneering. We love going out in the wilderness and sort of chopping down the tree to create their own house. They love that feeling of hard work to just push the dream. And with that comes that sense of purpose. Like I am doing something that’s never been done before, of the gifts that God has given me and a sense of joy waking up every Monday morning to head to work. I think when you talk about people who have that self-directed life with the feeling that God is giving them something to do and they can chart their course in God has giving them a lot of freedom, kind of decide, Hey, how is the future going to look? And they really are painful to him, but also clear about the vision that kind of person can do. And then in the church, I think what happens is oftentimes and you’re getting this from a pastor as well. So I felt this before. There’s a little bit of an intimidation factor when entrepreneurs move really quick and they break things and they fix them and they break them again. I think there’s a sense of how do I he will this gift. But I think in this in this cultural moment, I mean, we’re recognize there’s an opportunity for entrepreneurs, men and women, to go out and create something that’s never been created before. And so pastors are able to have a little bit more of a sort of an open hand towards the things that entrepreneurs are going to create, knowing that look like if they go out and build ministries and they go out and create things, the pastors can come alongside them and support them and that kind of stuff. But ultimately, it’s going to be it’s going to be good for the church because they’re going to create something that’s never been created before and things are going to take off in somewhat not, but they’ll still have opportunities to really mold them and make sure that they’re in line with the gospel. And so those are a lot of opportunities that I see it. And I think there’s a lot of opportunities for pastors to really sort of take a step back. But also partner with entrepreneurs is a critical guest and created a full.

Chip Ingram I think as pastors, we we thought we’re supposed to develop these programs to meet all these needs and everyone’s told to get all their needs met through our one local church. And I think actually what you find is that God’s put people in the local church who have a variety of gifts to meet the various needs of that community in that place. Hey, man. And what we’re really best at is loving people, shepherding them. Over and over I got to where I realize I mean, so, you know, you guys know some some of the guys that were in our church, I mean, this this guy’s got the executive office and app or Google or these places. And I’m thinking, how can I help you walk with God? How can I help you with all these pressures in your marriage is really hard. Those jobs create wealth, and wealth makes it hard to be a good dad because you can give your kids just about everything instead of hold them responsible or make time. Those jobs will eat your life and just let work take you over. See, as pastors, our role doesn’t get diminished. What it does, it gets focused on how do we help entrepreneurs in where they really need it, and then how do we let them blaze new trails, launch new ministries and get rid of the red tape and the bureaucracy that most of them experience in the church?

Dan Owolabi You know, Chip, I’ll jump on that. That is a fantastic statement. And I think one of the things that’s super important in that is that an entrepreneur, if they really want to run and so you sort of come back, then rotate and give them the opportunity to do that. That is huge. But I think what happens is oftentimes pastors don’t know who the entrepreneurs are that think they assume, hey, look, you know, most people succeeded in their jobs. There’s a very small percentage of people that are willing to run. If you can find those people, bring them together in groups, might take them to a conference like work together with those, you know, small group of people they can run and you can shepherd people who have a daily 9 to 5 job different way, but shepherding entrepreneurs and letting them run and giving them freedom, but also supporting them in ways that haven’t felt supported in their whole lives. And that’s a that’s a recipe for miracles. I mean, thanks to really start to when when you do things that way. And it’s really.

Justin Forman Fascinating how we’re stepping into a new age. You know, we’ve talked about this from a content standpoint. When I think about my kids on a Friday night, we all get together and watching films and watching Netflix. You know, my two girls might be watching something. My wife might want to watch something. My teenage son might want to watch something else. And like so much of content, consumption has become micro targeted, right? Like, you find the audience, you find a movie, and it’s all about matching. We talk about a endless amount of content from YouTube and other user generated stuff. There’s so much out there and it’s less about content. It’s about matching. And isn’t it a fascinating thing. And yet the number one way that we communicate to the church, we communicate to the body of Christ on a Sunday morning, it’s still that one to many, right? Like there’s going to have to be some innovation, something there that’s going to happen. There’s some disruption for good that when you’re sitting there on a Sunday morning and you’re thinking, if I’m, you know, and me, people often talk about this, if you’ve come from a broken home in a broken place and you didn’t have a great picture of a father, if you’re talking about the relationship with God in a heavenly Father perspective, that’s going to be hard to break through. Well, so if we take that analogy and we talk about entrepreneurs at work and there’s so much challenge, but yet there’s so much opportunity that the gospel could go deeper if we could figure out how do we kind of like find that little target audience and really hit them with that right perspective to it. I just think it’s fascinating, especially in a time and era that we find ourselves in political campaigns where people are microtargeting a group. The same could be true. There could be an opportunity here for the church as well.

Chip Ingram And even some of the comments of. It’s unconscious. But I don’t mean this strictly that you just said it because we’re so ingrained when they come in. They’re sitting there in the church.

Justin Forman And really.

Dan Owolabi Right.

Chip Ingram Right. That’s where participation is going to happen. Is really that the right model is there may be a time where everyone needs to come together, but do we need to do it the way we’re doing it if participation is going to happen? You know, interviewing people who have had broken world experiences. And that group’s going to be meeting for this season over here. In other words, I think we got to question all of our assumptions about what sort of I go to this one place and these things happen at that place, and they do this for my kids at that place. And now, by the way, and I’ve been a part of that for, you know, for 40 years. But what I can tell you is the churches that become very effective, the biggest work you have is trying to figure out once they get to that one place, how to do what you said. And so that’s why it takes huge amounts of staff, huge amounts of money, as opposed to, again, it’s a paradigm shift. Every member is a minister. Everyone’s in full time ministry. We’ve got to give them the platform and allow them. And it’s messy. Let them do some of the teaching. Let them do the sharing. We got to the point where people would come with that idea and usually it’s like, Well, we can’t do that right now. Or often someone would say, gosh, that’s a really important person. And they reported that you’re so, well, we’ll try and go do their thing. And we just came to, you know, Hey, this is something has happened. Runaway teens or HIV patients who are, you know, wish you’d be doing X, Y and Z. And I got to where it would be like, Wow, that’s great, guys. Put that on your heart. I said, Yeah. I said, We’ll find at least two other people. Okay. Two other people that that’s on their heart. And then tell you what, you know, eventually I had a full time person to do this, but it was that I want you on one page. You can give me five, but I only read one on one page. Identify the problem. Second, this is my solution. And what are my first three steps to solve that? You and your team, by the way, we have no budget for it, but we’ll get 1% behind you. A 80% of the people never came back. So at least I didn’t have to try and fulfill their role. And then the greatest ministries that ever happened were like and they were you know, one was an entrepreneur, a mom with a special needs Down syndrome, adult child who said no one cares about her. She found two other ladies and she found a guy with some administrative gifts. I looked up three years later and we had like four rows of Down syndrome adult kids in church praising God. But again, our churches are filled with people. You know what? Well, you don’t have to motivate. Those people don’t have to tell them they ought to come to church. You don’t have to say you really ought to give. We’ve got to unleash people into what God made them to do and the passions he gave them. And we have to understand the current organizational structures at times can support it. At other times it won’t. But let’s let’s ask. Do you really think that really church is very organized? And me, for 300 years we never had a cathedral.

Justin Forman Then they didn’t have Google sheets. They didn’t have.

Chip Ingram Work Google sheets. You know, as one historian said, it got messy and there was chaos. And, you know, church history is about where the cults emerged and all that. They basically had this is the work of Jesus. And every time we get together, we’re going to remember exactly who he is and what he did. We’re going to take the Lord’s Supper, but not as little add on this as Central. Second is your identity completely changes. So it’s not just about getting wet. It’s you used to be this. You died and you got resurrected and there’s a whole new light and there’s a whole new agenda. And your God that worked in the East. And guess what? Are you ready? You’re not some audience that needs to be pandered. You’re not a consumer. You just joined the supernatural army of God of Light against Darkness to completely change the world. And it starts in your home, your neighborhood and your world. And by the way, our job to help you get there.

Dan Owolabi Yeah, that that’s fantastic, you know? Yeah. And I just I’ll say this for the fifth time today, your optimism is so contagious. I mean, this fantastic to hear because I think what you’re looking at and is you’re looking at a situation where people wonder why it’s messy. Like, why aren’t we there yet? Why are we still talking with the same problem? But what you’re doing is you’re going back to the early church and you’re saying, look, hindsight is deceptive. Oftentimes when we read the Bible and we said everything is just linearly, first they did this and they did this. And I don’t know. I mean, there was a lot of switchbacks, a lot of mistakes. In fact, the other day I was just reading about the civil rights movement and I said there for a long time I thought it was just somebody did this and then somebody did that, and there’s something to that. And they just kept winning along the way. And the reality is it was messy and confusing and hard and people quit and then they came back again. And, you know, it’s a lot. Some suddenly got killed. And, you know, so you’re thinking about what real movement should we look like. And oftentimes in the middle, you don’t realize you’re in the middle of a movement. You just really struggle, struggle. And so I think what you’re doing is you’re giving us hope and you’re saying right now feels like a big struggle and it feels messy. And pastors are like, why are people leaving and why aren’t they coming? But what you’re saying is there’s a lot of hope and it’s going to be messy. And it’s okay to embrace that and recognize you’re not going to see God working the full picture until years later.

Chip Ingram Maybe you’ll see.

Dan Owolabi And maybe you’ll be up. You’re not going to look back and say, I see it now.

Justin Forman Yeah. I mean, how many how many movies are very good without a good villain? How many movies are very good without a struggle? Why would we think that our faith is being different? When you think about some of the things like, as you said, a movement has to have struggle, has to have versity as part of it. And what makes this epic quest good makes what joy makes it for that adventure of it. And there is just so much it wrapped up in that I want to pivot us to a thing here because we often say that we don’t want to give a pep rally without a football game to go to. That’s Texan for we don’t want to give you all hyped up about something without a next step. And so when we think about this idea, one of the reasons why we want to intentionally have this conversation was, a, to celebrate what had happened, to celebrate what has happened, to celebrate how it’s become normative, to have this conversation about faith and work over the past 20, 30 years. There are an endless amount of heroes that we could celebrate and thank in that. But one of the things that we want to point to is we want to make this conversation durable. It’s a word that we’ve used a lot. It’s actually some friends that we met. It was on it talked about this durable network of a conversation of how do we keep this going and what does that look like. And so we have felt just called as a team of faith to an entrepreneur to say, okay, there’s something trying to happen. What Chip’s talks about is not an isolated conversation and praise God for it. There’s more pastors that are waking up saying, okay, we got to question the model. We got to flip the script and we got to do this. We don’t know the answers. It’s still messy. We’re shaping fog and we got to do this together. And so as we’ve gotten into that, on February 20th, we are hosting an event specifically for pastors that are stepping into this moment, and they’re wrestling with this question saying, goodness gracious, something is happening here. There’s an opportunity. I want to find out what is it, what’s happening now in this moment and how can we get involved as a church? And so some of the details on that is going to be three streamed events were streaming it regionally for different parts of the world. We’ve got an Asia kind of Pacific region. We’ve got an Africa Europe kind of time zone and we’ve got the Americas and three different places. We’re gathering pastors in the convenience of online because we know how busy the schedule is. We know how high demand it is. We wanted to give an easy first step. And so Pastors and Entrepreneurs conference is attempting to bring together this conversation in a safe place, talking with other peers to wrestle through these issues and say, what might this look like? And so if you’re listening and you’re an entrepreneur, I want to encourage you, this is the place to invite a pastor. Now, it doesn’t have to just be a teaching pastor, executive pastor, men’s women’s pastor, discipleship pastor. Why is it that somebody is in your church that really is centered about connecting? Passionate about convening. I think one of the chip’s things that he talked about is oftentimes we mistake. And I think this is part of the movement’s fault from an onus from a faith and work kind of conversation is we’ve expected somehow a pastor to go through business school, go through an MBA, walk in our shoes and fully understand everything. Newsflash That’s not going to happen. There’s going to be a mutual respect. And the same way that we’re not going to stop everything. Our business plan go to seminary and everything. We’ve got to respect the role that God has for each of us to play. And I think one of the greatest opportunities that pastors can be as a conduit and a convener, a conduit and convener and connector and kind of the things that what Chipp mentioned are bringing those people together. And so our hope, though, is that there’s a conversation that takes place that so people can understand it and understand this conversation. So Chip is going to be a part of that. Some other friends like Nicky Gumbel and Dermot Gray and David Platt and others, are we presenting some information from Barna, from the research with David Kinnaman? But we really want to make this a place to wrestle through this together. And so, guys, I would love to flip it to you as we’re kind of coming to this close here is, is like what encouragement we got entrepreneurs listening. How would they crack the code? What’s the advice that you would give to them as they’re going to talk to their pastor and they’re making that invitation. What would be the angle? What would be the perspective? What would be the plea? What would be that message that you would encourage of why a pastor should come join a conversation like this? Chip, we’ll start with you.

Chip Ingram I think one is I would as an entrepreneur, I’d I’d sell I wouldn’t give a little invitation. I wouldn’t do it by email. And hope becomes I would get a lunch or a coffee and then I would identify with him first. You know what? The world kind of got turned upside down. Lot of people have been in The Crucible and you’ve been in it a lot. How can I help? I really want to. I want to. I want the church to be successful. What? What are your current needs? If you if you’re listening, what are your top 2 or 3 challenges as a pastor right now? Yeah, I think the thing is that as pastors, we always feel like someone’s asking of us. What can I saw? What can I do? Why marriage is hurting or, you know, why aren’t you doing this? Or why aren’t you doing that? I think I would come with the posture of I would really like to be a part of helping. And and I think that, you know, I have a network of people and a skill set. And I’d like to invite you into my world, because I think there’s a lot of us that don’t know how to get into your world. But I think there’s may be some of you that know how to get into our world. Before you ask me the question, actually, I’m sorry. Being a pastor, I jumped immediately to if I was a pastor, how I look back on. How did all these like, well, you know, my friends, how well, how in the world did all those people end up teaching me the kind of stuff that you guys are talking about? And what I remember is I just as a pastor, I thought were you help me, I can’t do X, Y, Z. I don’t know how to do X, Y, Z. This is a bit over my head. Would you I remember one guy said, would you give me an hour and and I know you’re super busy. Just an hour. And I’ll have on the whiteboard my challenges and I mean really clear and I’ll have a turkey sandwich and we eat for 20 minutes. You eat and I’ll give you. I will, I will, I will identify. Here’s where we’re at. Here’s the challenge. Here’s my biggest questions. And then we you for 40 minutes talk into that. And that was actually the guy we learned later started Kleiner Perkins at Twitter. And because someone told me that guy’s a really good leader and he knows a lot about this stuff and I’m thinking, I don’t know what to do. He came number one, he got a good turkey sandwich. And I mean, I learned 20 minutes. I was done. I had it really clear on the whiteboard. And three hours later he left. Yeah, well, he he started to Look, Jeff, here’s how leadership works and here’s how you doing it here. At this point, you need to go to a matrix. What are your KPIs? I said, what’s a KPI? Okay. I look that, you know, okay, here’s what we’re doing. What do you know? And literally he became an early coach and then it was like, wow, there’s all these people at these us, you know, on the pastor side. So I tried to flip it. And I think if an entrepreneur would say, Boy, you’re under a lot of pressure, I would love to be of some help. I don’t really know how we’re going to have a conference where Pastor Thorne’s producers talk. What we need is, you know, the synapse, right? We need that little synapse where pastors get connected maneuvers and connects, get connected, where we get a little bit of a common language. And then I hear, here’s what I would say to is because entrepreneurs are very, very dizzy under pressure and move fast, Pastors are largely overwhelmed and some do, but most don’t move very fast, as I think you have to be willing to say, don’t tell him you want to help them unless you. Don’t. I mean. Are you willing to after this conference, say and by the way, they’ll they’ll they’ll frustrate you to death, you know, because it’s obvious to you you need to do X, Y and Z and and well, that’s you know, I’ve got to talk to the board and we need to have a committee and of. And you’re shaking your head going, gosh. And so you have to help him learn how to talk to to make some of those changes. And the greatest friends I’ve had in the whole world in my whole pastoral journey, some have ended up on a board, but it’s been a guy on the sidelines or two that I could share. Here’s all my issues. I don’t know how to do this. Will you help me? And I mean, I met with him, if not weekly, almost weekly, and it was like I was going to school and this is what happened last week. Here’s what I started to understand. And it taught me to think in a different way. So my point is, we all want this to happen. I just wrote this word The cost is high because it’s time to pay it. Really? You really? Yeah. I mean, we really have to care for each other. And I would say the same to pastors. We want people to show up with their gifts, their time and their energy to make a difference and their money and run our program. You got to just throw that out. You got to love people. You got it. You got to find out how are they really doing Just because you’re smart and you got money, that doesn’t mean your life’s going well. Just get you got a pretty wife and you walk in the door. It doesn’t mean your marriage is going well. As you know, Justin, entrepreneurs and people that run fast have a variety of issues that the average person may not have. And a pastor could be one of the greatest gifts that ever happened to say I mean, I just I’ve said to guys that I’m sure that they’re very famous and very powerful, but you keep living the way you live and you’re going to be on life number four. But I care about you. God’s forgiven the past. You know, you keep. Entrepreneurs need someone that I don’t want your money. I don’t want your vacation house. I’m not going to accept anything from you. I want to help you. But that’s got to go both directions. And then when that trust is built, that’s when I’ve seen great things happen. And this certainly is not. I mean, the pastors that I run with or the entrepreneurs that I know, this is happening all over the place. But it’s got to be what you all are doing is this conference to me is like it. It has to be a beginning synapse. You know, I have this picture of of the electrical impulse moving from this side over to the other side. And we got lots of pastors that care and lots of entrepreneurs, but we’ve got to get them together.

Justin Forman I love what you’re saying there, Chip, I think. I mean, when we break it down in some of those relationships that are closest to us, when we think about parenting or in a marriage relationship, nobody gets very far by demanding. Nobody gets very far by asking, loudly, pleading, yelling, trying to get their way. But if I were to own it for the faith and weren’t conversation over the last 20 years, I think that that’s been a lot of the problem. Our tempo, our tone. We’ve come to a pastor out of our frustration without understanding theirs. We haven’t come to a place of humility. We’ve come to a place of frustration. And we all know whether it’s through parenting or marriage or whatever it might be, we’re going to get a whole lot further if we change that temperature and we change that tone. And I think that that’s very much true in this relationship because there’s a gap. And we’ve got to come with that posture of humility. I love love what you have there. Dan, what would you add as we come to a finish here?

Dan Owolabi Yeah. You know, I think I would agree with everything yourself to this point. And I think inherent in what you’re saying, obviously relationship is key. You know, relationship is the bridge in which you really see truth and you can have that conversation. I think inherent in that is a realization that the entrepreneur themselves has a responsibility to transmit the gospel within their sphere. I think their pastor isn’t somebody who’s on a pedestal like, Why aren’t you helping me? No, no, no. We are partnering with you. And so the sense of like being arm in arm together and saying, okay, I get that you’re you’re I mean, you have a sphere that is just killing you moms and, you know, just a lot of different people who, you know, really I mean, you wouldn’t have the opportunity to reach. But I have my space and we’re doing incredible work over here. Is there are ways that we can form together having this sort of joy conversation and not sort of holding the past responsible for something that he never and believe was supposed to do in the first place, you know, or, you know, a language that he meant where he can actually speak because he never got an MBA. And so realizing that I have my responsibility, he has that is his or she has hers or whatever. Just recognizing that there’s a moment of sort of joint accountability and then coming together just like chipset and say, all right, so where can we meet together and actually share notes? Where can we help each other in that conversation, in that moment, and is able to say, hey, there’s actually a conference room that actually speaks multiple of our languages? Yeah, we can come to I mean, all along you want boy, you know, I looked at if you can’t come this year, I get it. You can come next year. In fact, I’ll get a chicken. I’m going to turkey sandwich. We’ll come down and sit together and we’ll actually watch it. Then we’ll spend 20 minutes whiteboarding after we’re done. But like that sort of, you know, not looking for the pastor to sort of serve us. But I’ll say, hey, look, let’s do this together. And on the world, let’s let’s fight the giants gods behind us and get our challenge in front of us. Let’s we’ll get it together. That’s inspirational. I think a lot of pastors will get on the.

Chip Ingram Yeah. Good morning.

Justin Forman What would a great flipping the script there Dan? Yeah if we started the conversation said pastor hey we know the church is we’re going through a tough season. Well, you know where there weren’t any tough season culturally, climate, whatever it is, we’re here to help. I’ve got some conversations, some questions that posture of humility, of which have talked about me and that just just a great way to do that. So let that be your encouragement and let that be your charge feature. And entrepreneurs, as you’re listening to this and you’re thinking about how do I start that conversation started out of humility, started out of that place of wanting to work together and true to form, we want to make sure that we give you tools to even make that conversation easier. While we can’t give you a code for a turkey sandwich for free or a chicken sandwich for.

Dan Owolabi Free, not right now. It’s coming though.

Justin Forman Right now and it might be in the works. We brought somebody else to play, maybe to come through on that. But in this moment, we do want to give you a tool to do that. So if you use a code called church, and if you are listening to that, use that code Church 100 on that pastors and entrepreneurs.org website. We want to gift you with a free pass to being able to make sure that you and your pastor can attend to being able will experience that. We never ever, ever want any sort of finances to get in the way of what God doing. And so if there is an opportunity for that code to be helpful to you, to your ministry, to your church, and just make it even easier to have that conversation, we hope that that would be a tool for you. So February 20th, we will be having that conversation. We hope that you’ll join us. Chip, Dan, so grateful to be with you, grateful to see what God’s doing and and just what encouragement you’ve been to the movement and the work that God has, both of you guys and so grateful for having you join us.

Chip Ingram My pleasure.

Dan Owolabi It’s been a lot of fun.

Chip Ingram Great to meet you then.

Dan Owolabi Yeah, you too. Nice person.

Justin Forman All right, guys. Well, we’ll see on the next episode. 

Thanks for joining us. Thank you for joining us for the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. If you are interested in learning more about the Pastor and Entrepreneur. Conference on February 20th, head to the link in our Show Notes. Podcast listeners and use the code form in 50.  To get 50% off the registration fee.

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