Wes Johnson - Count It All As Joy
You were listening to The Cumberland Road, and I'm your host, TJ Malinoski. Wes Johnson is a Senior Consultant for Transitional Consulting, a firm that provides search support and placement, organizational development, and executive consulting for businesses. He's a Cumberland Presbyterian minister, a game reviewer for NCAA Division 1 Basketball. And beginning in 2023, West will be the stated clerk for Red River Presbytery. In this conversation, we talk about leadership, conflict, evangelism, starting new churches, and how Wes' life and faith is tied to all of these. And now, my friend, enjoy this faith conversation with Wes Johnson.
T.J.:Wes, you work for a company called Transitional Consulting. It's a firm that helps individuals and organizations change and grow. You've worked with Fortune 500 companies, multi church staff, traditional congregations, contemporary congregations. So what does traditional consulting do, and what does it do on a macro level and a micro level, And then, what is your role in the firm?
Wes:Thank you, TJ. Before I get into that, I just wanna make sure that I do say thank you to you for the excellent work that you do on this podcast. It has been so meaningful for me, who kinda lives on the fringes of our denomination, an ordained minister, obviously, in our denomination, but not an active church ministry, in what I term as marketplace ministry, but and then living out here in the frontier that we call Texas, it has been more than informational. It has been an encouragement to me to hear the stories of CPs all around the denomination and especially encouraging to hear about all the new talent coming along. I mean, it was just yesterday that I was graduating from seminary, and then in a blink of an eye, 40 years later, I'm wondering about the future of our denomination, and it has been a real encouragement, and, to be able to hear all of these stories.
Wes:So God bless you for the important work you do in telling these stories of faith and how God's captured us and how he's using us in unique ways. It's fascinating to me and such an inspiration as well. Well, I'm a senior consultant for transition consulting. Been doing that for 15, 17 years. Made a pivot in my life that we might can go over at some point in this.
Wes:Transition Consulting, is an HR consulting firm. We call it a boutique firm because it's really just myself and one other guy who lives in Long Beach, California who used to live in the Dallas Fort Worth area who had a transformative impact on my life and helping me to understand better who I am and to cooperate with God, based on the design that he's placed on me. But we saw people problems. Back in 1983, I went to a business person's lunch in the DFW Dallas Fort Worth area where the speaker that day was Truett Cathy, the founder, of course, of the Chick Fil A franchises, And Truett said something that's always stayed with me. He said, businesses or organizations don't succeed or fail.
Wes:People do. And it's always run true. It doesn't matter whether you're operating, an IT house or service industry or a church or nonprofit or whatever it happens to be, we're all in the people business. And that's where our strength is. We help companies grow or change positively by leveraging their most valuable assets.
Wes:Every organization, every person only has 3 assets. Those are time, money, and people, but the most important of those is always people. So our job is to help them get the right people on the bus, get them in the right positions, operating at full capacity, and then if they have to take them off, we can compassionately coach them through reemployment. So it tends to be search assistance. We use a third party candidate screening using a temperament based model to help our clients not only understand the core personalities of the people that they're gonna be hired, but also to understand their emotional intelligence, which is critically important to be successful in life and work is to evaluate that in your people that you're gonna be working with.
Wes:And, and then on the backside of that, which is originally how we began as an organization, we began initially as a totally a senior outplacement firm, is if people are taken off the bus, if they're separated from the company as part of their severance benefit, they will hire us to coach them through the reemployment process. And that really came based on, the transformation that came in my partner's life who was given that benefit when he was separated from a company, and that gentleman, led him to Christ as a result of it. And we've always seen that as a valuable area of ministry because, especially in men's life, men tend to think of themselves as human doings, and our worth is determined by our work. Mhmm. A little bit stereotypic, but nonetheless so when we don't have work, we don't feel like we have any worth.
Wes:And that time without meaningful work can be really difficult for a man, but it is for anybody because it impacts the relationships around you and whatever. And we've always seen that as a very fertile time to share the seeds of the gospel with people that are going through that transition, so we do that. Most of what we do though is leadership development, professional development, culture evolution, conflict resolution, lots of different things, but it's really helping the people on the bus perform at optimum capacity. So a lot of leadership and professional development, related to that, aspect of it. For instance, my partner does a lot with private equity companies that will hire us to go in when they're buying companies.
Wes:Yes. There are people that flip companies. There are companies that buy companies to bump up their value and then sell those companies to create wealth for other people. And those companies will hire us to go in and evaluate the talent, decide to keep them, develop them, or if we have to separate them, we can help them out with that. So we solve people problems.
Wes:That's what we do because that's the, the most important asset you have to grow your organization.
T.J.:Alright. You used the analogy bus. And I can see that in a secular work in terms of a staff because, you know, you've you've hopped onto the bus, and in return, you get benefits, you know, salary, benefits, that sort of thing. But in terms of a church, and you're going through that transitional phase, how do you get people on the bus? And at times, how do you get people off the bus when you are consulting with a church?
Wes:Good questions. No. I I I hesitate. Nonprofit leadership is far more difficult than secular leadership because you do not have the ways to incent them with pay or benefits or any kind of perks like that. You have to, I mean, this is all altruism.
Wes:Right? So it is very difficult. I think the greater leadership skills are needed by a pastor or a nonprofit executive than they have as a CEO of a fortune 100 company. They're just less resources to deal with, but yet you're still needing to leverage people. You're trying to get them into to to service with all the aspects of the church and that type of thing.
Wes:So, I'm not sure how best to respond to that, except you just have to prioritize that and how that you work with people. Leadership, we're not really trained for that. For those of you who've been through graduate school on the theological level, seminary does a great job training you theologically, but it does not prepare you for organizational leadership. Mhmm. There's a void.
Wes:There's a vacuum there, and we find a lot of our consulting is, just coaching them to be a better leader, pastors or whoever those executives in a nonprofit happen to be because they they tend to be great vision leaders, but they don't have executional excellence of taking a vision and actually implementing it. It's implementing it is hard. And there's a difference between management and leadership, and helping them understand the difference from that. And in a small church setting where, you know, it's a single cell church like we have in our denomination, most of us most of our churches are 100 to 100, you're wearing pretty much all the hats. So, you can't staff for your weaknesses, and yet you still have weaknesses, so you need to find people with complimentary giftedness in your church and empower them to come alongside you and do what you don't do.
Wes:It's best when a pastor does what they do best, when they know what their superpower is and they're investing 80 percent of their time doing what they're best at, and and then releasing other people to do what they're not best at. But that's easier said than done.
T.J.:Yeah. I would imagine it'd be difficult in a nonprofit organization or the church. As you're going through leadership change, as you're going through, well, the composition of change, when you have somebody who is part of the church and they could actually say, well, you need to leave because I've been on this bus longer than you have. And I would imagine that there would be a lot of conflict resolution in terms of the firm that you're a part of? What what does that look like?
T.J.:I mean, are you skilled in conflict resolution?
Wes:Yeah. We deal with that a lot. First of all, in every crisis, there's always existing an opportunity, and so you need to change your mindset on conflict. Conflict's not a bad thing. There's a difference between negative information and negative communication, and there's nothing wrong with negative, information.
Wes:The avoidance of conflict is what we know to be as an essential, dysfunction in organizations. First of all, as a pastor, you ought to come in and you need to establish the trust. So you gotta develop those relate relationships and build a platform of trust, And that takes, you know, 3 to 6 months if you're a brand new pastor doing that. And there is some truth that you'll find out when you're kind of interviewing with any organization. It's an artificial, experience.
Wes:Everybody's pretending on to be the best behavior. You're the best candidate they could possibly ever hire, and they're the best church that you could ever possibly go to. And then you get in there and you're confronted with the brutal realities that that's not fully true. And once you define the realities, you find out some of the people you thought you'd get along well with, you don't, and some that you don't, you do. And, there's always a little bit of a power struggle and there's those who you have to learn, and in many ways you have to keep your friends close and keep your enemies closer, but you do need to build, first of all, the relationships to to to kinda build the trust to lead well.
Wes:But conflict is not a bad thing. Conflict, there there's no progress. There's no positive change without challenge, and there's no challenge without change, and there's no change without conflict. It just goes together. And so the avoidance of it is really a bit a bad thing.
Wes:In life, change and loss are inevitable. It's growth that's optional. You can either go through what you're going through or you can grow through it, and you need to grow through it. So you actually need to lean into the cobblet because in that crisis, there's an opportunity. You need to find that opportunity and leverage it.
T.J.:Is that where your firm can come in? Because sometimes when you're in the middle of a crisis, it's hard to see what the opportunity is. It's hard to see beyond the crisis because you're living it, you're experiencing it individually and collectively. Is your firm helpful or even if what advice do you have when a leader is going through a crisis or a conflict situation?
Wes:Well, confronted conversations again, there there is a science and there's a little bit of an art to it as well. I mean, first of all, you wanna step back and find in any kind of criticism or negative feedback you get. What's the shred of truth in it? There's always a little bit of truth. And that can hurt sometimes.
Wes:Yeah.
T.J.:I'm laughing I'm laughing because it's true, and it can be hurtful. And yet I we can grow from it.
Wes:Yeah. Yeah. You need to look at yourself first. Do I bear some responsibility in this? Major issue in our culture is the inability to accept responsibility for anything.
Wes:So what is my responsibility? So first of all, you gotta draw boundaries For myself, all great leaders begin by being great self leaders. They'll self aware, They have a profound sense or a profound self acceptance that hopefully will lead to an effective self leadership. They know what their strengths are. They know what their shortcomings are.
Wes:They're very vulnerable about that without necessarily being fully transparent. That's another thing we could discuss as well. But, yeah, first of all, you look at yourself and where is my responsibility? Again, boundaries. Who am I responsible to and what am I responsible for?
Wes:And is anything out of alignment in that area? Then beyond that, you just gotta go wade into it and have have the conversation, understanding that people don't see things as they are. They see them as they are. So if you'll seek to understand rather than be understood, an old Stephen Covey principle of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, that's where you gotta gotta go. I, years ago, before I became self aware, and I'm continuing to learn in that area, I could be kind of an arrogant SOB.
Wes:Hopefully, my wife's not in the background, and you hear her admitting at this point. And I did not realize for years that under stress, I become less compliant. And so I go into attack mode, and, I had to learn that my trigger for anger is feeling disrespected. And so I had to learn to mind my emotions, to separate myself, to de emotionalize it, to separate myself from the moment, and then to get in my head and out of my heart for a moment and say, is this real? And a lot of times when we're called in, that's the first thing we have to do.
Wes:Is this a perceived problem or is it a real problem? Is it just a communication problem or is it a real problem? And the only way to do that obviously is to have conversations. But for me for me, personally, I have to step back and say, am I really being disrespected, or am I just feeling disrespected? Is that some past wound that's surfacing itself?
Wes:I've covered it up with the long sleeves of my pretense, but it's coming back up in my marriage from a or whatever it happens to be. I had, our family, I married, I I I'm previously married, and my current wife who hates to be called that, she prefers to be called my last wife. When I married her, she had 2 children already. So we got into a situation and and early on in the disciplinary processes you have in a lot of families, there's usually a strict parent and a a little more graceful parent. I, the non biological parent, was a little more strict, and there were times early in our marriage when I would discipline the kids.
Wes:And what do they do? They always run to the one that will give them the grace. Right? They run to the easy parent. So they would run around and get try to get mom to undo any kind of discipline that I do.
Wes:So I was feeling disrespected. Well, I'm not really being disrespected by a a 9 year old. Okay? They're just being a 9 year old. Okay?
Wes:So I had to learn to separate, am I really being disrespected, or am I being disrespected? So I think minding that emotion, being a good self leader, knowing what your, shortcomings are, what your strengths are, and then learning to manage that time, emotions, and priorities. We teach a lot, to leaders about how to how to do self management.
T.J.:Alright. I took us down the path of conflict resolution and and crises, but there's more more to it. There's another side of when a congregation is going through leadership change, your consulting firm also assists with that as well. So you can help be a guide. I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but you have the ability to be a guide to help congregations do, discernment and look inwardly and help them along the search?
T.J.:What does that look like?
Wes:Oh, yeah. Well, there's a difference yeah. If we're talking about search, yeah, any organization, if if they're going through a leadership change, they need to step back and, evaluate where they are and decide where they wanna be and what type of leader they need to take them there. But sometimes they need assistance to kinda confront those brutal realities because, again, we don't see things as they are. We see them as we are, and we have a confirmation bias that we wanna find what we want to find.
Wes:The worst thing a congregation can do is actually, do a survey of the congregation. That all all surveys of congregation for the pastor they weren't turn out looking exactly the same. They want Jesus. And that's what the Jewish people wanted too, and they ended up crucifying him. So that doesn't work well.
Wes:There's got to be somebody, and that's usually the elder or the session, who has to step back and do the hard work of evaluating it. Of having the conversations, looking at the data, and seeing is there blind erosion that's been going on. A lot of churches think, well, we're not we're not growing, but we're not getting worse. No. Plateau is a myth.
Wes:If you're not going up, you're going backwards. If you're on an airplane, when they level that plane off, well, they say they're leavened, we're cruising at 38,000 feet. We're now turning off the seat belt sign. You're free to move about the cabin. If you go to the restroom in the back and you walk to the front of the plane, you're walking uphill because in order to stay level, the plane has to be articulated upward.
Wes:Mhmm. It has to actually be climbing to stay level, and that's the way it is in an organization. If that plane turns its nose down to where it's actually level with the earth, it's descending, And churches don't realize that as well, organizations don't realize that. They have what's called blind erosion, and oftentimes by the time they realize they're going down, they're so far down, that now the knee jerk is how do we survive rather than how do we grow in in organizations. I think that took us off on a little different pan path there, but, yeah, we'll come in and we can help that.
Wes:But a congregation can do that too, but it it it just takes lay leadership to to do that evaluation because you've got to decide. There are in companies, there was a Harvard Business guy, Michael Watkins, who uses, an acronym, STARS, to evaluate stages of companies. And this works with churches too. And it helps you to understand what type of leadership skills we need. So there are STARS, s t a r s, startups, turnarounds, accelerated growth, realignment, sustained success.
Wes:Startup, well, that would be where you need somebody that's, excited and ignited about creating something out of nothing, that has that is that energizer bunny that has that ability to come in and immediately get things, going that weren't existing previously. That's a very rare gift. They're 1 in a 100. Turnaround. That's somebody that'll fish or cut, very black and white thinking, has very thick skin, but just has the capacity to quickly come in, take something that's been going south, and immediately level that off and get it going north.
Wes:Again, very rare type of personality. Realignment and accelerated growth are kind of in the same category. Accelerated growth is a plateaued organization that needs to needs somebody to come in and catalyze that to a new level of effectiveness or growth. A lot more people have that capacity. Realignment is typically something's become cluttered, You know, churches that have got too much activity, too much dilution of resources, of time, money, and people, somebody that can come in and kinda just get it live and lean and moving in a upward direction again, and then, of course, you have the sustained success.
Wes:And those are the Walmarts or the Target's people that are organizations that are already hitting on all their cylinders and just somebody that comes in and is a good maintainer of a great organization. But you need to step back and say, where are we? Because it's gonna take a different skill set of person to be able to do that. And so then you you you, typically, the the search process would be, where most search processes go wrong in organizations is is at the very beginning, is the foundation. They don't spend enough time specifying the role.
Wes:Mhmm. Building a candidate profile and a position profile. What do we expect from the position? What do we need in the candidate? And part of that is an analysis of where the organization is right now, where we think it should go, and what gift set is gonna be to take to do that.
Wes:And then, of course, you go to market with that, and then you have to help source the person, you have to showcase the person, you have to select them and secure them, and that's a whole other phases of the search process. But it all begins most of the time when churches are not happy or organizations are not happy with a new leader that they brought in, they haven't done the hard work of evaluating where they are, what they need. It's the specifying of the role. They need to be as specific as they can.
T.J.:Wes, how did you fall into how did you become part of this consulting world?
Wes:Well, that kinda gets into the faith story. So we can kinda go through the faith story and all of that. So I was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The first 18 years of my life were all about athletics, academics, and then an increasing role of personal faith. I grew up in the largest church in our denomination at the time, and my granddad was the pastor there.
Wes:He was there for 45 years. My dad was a Sunday school teacher of a Sunday school class of over 200. It was a church in itself. He was an elder as well. And, so, I mean, we were there like a lot of the folks that you've interviewed every time the door opened.
Wes:That was just the cadence of our life. It was Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, and any time in between happened to be that. I had all the Sunday school answers to all the Sunday school questions. And, but wasn't a believer. And then I'd even gone through confirmation class and become a member of the church because I wanted to be able to take communion and all that type of thing.
Wes:When I was in the 7th grade in 1970, I had an older brother that's 7 years older, so I learned well from him how to gain this. I was, I'm a learned extrovert, but I was very introverted, very shy at the time. We used to have in our presbyteriors, maybe they still do in some presbyteriors, a 5th, 5th Sunday rally.
T.J.:Yeah.
Wes:So any month that had 5 Sundays to it, we would, all the churches in the presbytery, all the youth groups would get together and have a meeting. And I learned from my older brother that that's a great opportunity to meet girls outside your youth group. And I was starting to get to that age where I was noticing members of the opposite sex. You can build friends with them. You kinda just go and make nice and and, listen to the older talking head during the service part of it.
Wes:We'll have a bunch of cookies, meet girls, and get a good setup for camp Glancy, later in the summer. Mhmm. I mean, I've I've been schooled pretty well.
T.J.:Yeah. You were planting seeds. I'll I'll
Wes:That's right.
T.J.:I can see it. I can see it.
Wes:So we go. And, the 5th Sunday rally this this time was we thought to be in South Pittsburgh, Tennessee. So all of us get in our cars, and we drive over to South Pittsburgh. And South Pittsburgh. Well, not really, they're sister cities, but they're tiny, and Richard City is another church just a few miles down the road, right, just a few 100 yards from the Alabama, Tennessee border.
Wes:That's actually where the Fifth Sunday rally was, meeting was was was happening. So we drive down there. We get there. Richard City's a tiny little church. Maybe 50 people can get in the auditorium, maybe 75.
Wes:I don't know. We get in there, and it's packed. And there's there's, chairs in the aisle. We have to get in the chairs in the aisle because we're so late getting there, we come shrinking in. I sit in the back in the little folding chair.
Wes:I'm a 7th grader. I got a 9th grade girl sitting right beside me from our youth group. And instead of being that older talking head who probably would have been about 35 actually about it. It was teenagers and young people. Some of you may have known Hugh Hanna, who, you know, but, I think he was one of them at the time.
Wes:And they were up strumming guitars and sharing their testimony, doing, like, camp songs, contemporary songs. It wasn't hymns. It wasn't all that, and it was just disarming. It was nothing like I expected. There had been previously, a few weeks earlier in South Pittsburgh, a youth revival at the football stadium there, and James Robinson out of Texas, a youth evangelist with the Southern Baptist had come and had had a crusade, and a lot of these kids had accepted Christ.
Wes:And now they're up sharing their testimonies. Side note to that, now this is 1970, 6 years before, in another football stadium in Bedford, Texas. My wife today had walked forward when that same evangelist was holding a crusade there to accept Christ. So both of us are kind of, owe a lot of debt to to his ministry. So, anyway
T.J.:And when you say wife today, you mean last wife?
Wes:My wife, Nancy. My wife.
T.J.:Last wife.
Wes:My last wife. That's right. My last wife. Absolutely. So so, yeah, they're sharing this testimony and all this time they get to the end of the service and they ask 2 questions that I never heard asked before, and I couldn't answer either one of them.
Wes:If you were to die tonight, do you know for sure you'd go to heaven? And second, has there ever been a time in your life when you know that you committed your life fully to god? And, of course, they did the typical kinda altar call, and they're strumming the guitars and all that type of thing. I just felt the conviction of the holy spirit. Again, a shy kid.
Wes:I couldn't go up there alone, but I peeked in the prayer. I know nobody usually peaks in the prayer. I go over to the my friend, the night great girl named Judy on the right of me, and I said, do you wanna go up? And she said, yeah. Do you wanna go up?
Wes:I said, yeah. And so we grabbed each other by the hand, and we went forward and put our hands and our lives, really, at the feet of Jesus, and that was the beginning. That was the beginning of it all. Faith was nurtured obviously through, a matrix of mentors and ministries. It's amazing how God puts in your path, intersects your life with people and with ministries to kinda continue to move you forward.
Wes:There was campus crusade for Christ, Explo 72, first time I ever came to Texas again, never knowing I would spend most of my life here. Had come to a youth crusade where 90000 80000 youth from all over the world had come to this place to learn how to evangelize, did that in the 9th grade, became deeply influenced by the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. And in my junior year in high school, I had a major rededication of my life because I was starting to get good at basketball, and I of my life because I was starting to get good at basketball, and I realized that could be a platform from which I could proclaim my faith more boldly. And And you were
T.J.:you were actually you had that mindset as a teenager. You saw basketball as a form of evangelism.
Wes:Yeah. Yeah. But that's because fellowship of of of it would build a platform for me to do that. Again, do what you do best, and do it to the glory of God, and to help other people, because it gave it was just opening and, you know, it just it just is. And so it was soon after that that I felt a sense of call to ministry.
Wes:I wasn't sure if that was respect for my granddad, my admiration. He's my hero in the faith and the greatest person I've ever known or whether it was real. So despite having some opportunities to play college basketball at the division 2 level, I decided to go to Bryan College, a nondenominational Christian college, north of Chattanooga, because I felt it could better prepare me for seminary, which I think I needed to go, and I could use that as a time to evaluate whether this was real, whether I want to go into law because I thought about law versus the but throughout my college years, rather well, and I played basketball there throughout my college years rather than that sense of call to ministry diminishing, it actually got heightened, so I just followed. You know, the next step in faith was to go to seminary. I had heard bad things about Memphis Theological Seminary, and so I was thinking about Dallas Theological Seminary, my major professor.
Wes:I was I majored in Greek and Hebrew, and and and, and don't don't be wooed by that. Be a bible major at my college, which is the reason I went there, you had to take 2 years of the original languages. And I'm good at languages I don't speak. I just have a facility at memorization, so I just did it because it came easy to me at the time. I can't remember any of it today, but, you know, you know, you know, put it on a test, and you let it go.
Wes:And, but I was looking at them. I was looking at Asbury. I was looking at Trinity EVAN outside of Chicago, and then Craig Martindale, who who was pastor of my home church at the time and says, you're getting in the car and you're coming to meet with me. And so we drove over to Memphis. Some of these names will ring bells for somebody.
Wes:First person I met was Bert Owen, big Bert. I mean, I'm 65. But my goodness, Bert's hand totally unfolded me, this gentle giant of a human being. And I found out that basically everything that I had been told was wrong. And so I made a commitment to go to Memphis, Theological Seminary, and so went there.
Wes:Wow. This is turning out to be a little longer story. So I went to seminary, ran with seminary, and, boldly declared to God that I'll go anywhere in the galaxy he wants me to go as long as it's east of the Mississippi. So that I could continue to eat crystal hamburgers, have pork barbecue, and enjoy southeast conference football. Again, you don't kinda tell your boss what y'all to do.
Wes:That's not how that works. But there was sort of something else that really factors in deeply, into my life. My life and my faith has been probably most formatively influenced by crises in my life, by transitions. One of the reasons I do what I do is because I've been through enough transitions personally and professionally. While I was in seminary, the wife that I had at the time was had been my high school sweetheart.
Wes:We got married 5 days before we went to Memphis. She didn't really want to be in Memphis, did come to love it very much, is still there today. But through decisions that were made, she decided that she wanted to divorce, and so, she came to Texas with me. I convinced her to come to Texas, Texas hoping we could, once I accepted a position down here in the Dallas Fort Worth area, I thought maybe if she got down here, we would be able to work things out. But on the second Saturday, I was here in my first password.
Wes:I woke up that morning to an empty house. Mhmm. I never never I did see her again, but never did she live in the house again. A month later, she sent a a moving truck to get the rest of her things, and I was left in a townhome, 2 bedroom townhome with a television set on a television stand, a couch, half of our half of our China, why I needed half of our formal China, and one lamp, and that's all I had. It was a very difficult time.
Wes:Obviously, I had to tell the church. Eventually, I tried to put that off. You know, TJ, I've been very blessed. I've been kind of a golden child. I was I'd never been cut from an athletic team.
Wes:I'd always been captain of the team. I'd always been leading scorer of the team, all this type of thing. I I never had to face the embarrassment of this type of thing. Mhmm. It was really, really hard for me.
Wes:And so I I kept trying to think, well, I could win her back over. You know? I could do this. So I was trying to do that by far, and then the session kept asking, well, where is she? Well, she's gone back to Tennessee to see family, and she did initially, but not fully.
Wes:Mhmm. And then finally, I had to tell them, you know, that she's pursuing a divorce, and I serve at your pleasure, so, you know, do what you will. And it's it's interesting at that time. In 1982, ministers would struggle whether or not to even marry divorced people. Like, if you were to ask my granddad, do you marry divorce people?
Wes:He said he said to me once, I really don't like to unless I know it's a divorce for biblical reasons. It's funny how times have changed. So the session looks around at each other, and they say, well, not half the people in the church are divorced. Who are we to cast the first stone? And I really think they did more ministry to me than I did to them in the 1st 2 years.
Wes:They were there. I was clinically depressed and didn't recognize it or acknowledge it. You know, I could sleep better at 10 in the morning than I could at 2 at night. I'd get up and drive around the city hoping I could go to sleep. Despite my weakness, the church grew like crazy.
Wes:God blessed it amazingly. We built new buildings. We were already out of space. We were needing to build a new sanctuary. If I'd have stayed there, I would have probably advocated that we sell the building and go get along a new freeway and build more of a regional type of church, but, choices that I made and choices that others made, we decided to part paths.
Wes:And part of it was interesting because during my time at Saint Timothy Church in Bedford, Texas, I was trying to be like the person I most admired in the world, which was my dad. I was trying to be a mini hymn. Mhmm. You're always a second best somebody else, and he had told me that. He always wanted to be Billy Sunday when he went into the ministry, and his dad had said, God asked you to be J Fred Johnson, not Billy Sunday.
Wes:And yet it's it's so hard wearing a mask of somebody else. And I came to understand something that would change my life forever, and that is I like to be around people that are far from God. I was an introvert, but what winds my clock is helping churches find new and creative ways to reach unreached people. Every time I take a spiritual gift inventory, it's always evangelism number 1, administration and teaching, but evangelism is number 1. Always been that way.
Wes:So if it was a a choice with being on aunt Betty's port, drinking sweet tea, and reading the bible on a Tuesday night, or at the Bedford Boys Ranch playing basketball with a bunch of guys that are far from God, that's a no brainer. I'm going balling with those guys. And so when I left that church, I started thinking, what do I wanna do? I was concerned about the fact that our denomination did not have a lot of churches in major metropolitan areas. Our idea of a church plant is you take a church split and think you can create a healthy church out of an unhealthy situation, and it never worked very well.
Wes:And so I wanted to see if there was a a way to plant churches in a major metropolitan area without a core group, and if that could be an impetus to change and growth in our denomination. Now I had been starting to be exposed to this new seeker movement. Of course, I'm the same age as a lot of these folks, the Rick Warrens and the the Bill Hybels at Saddleback and at at Willow Creek, that was coming to the fore, and I was kind of intoxicated with that. And, there was a church in the Dallas Fort Worth area as well that I learned a lot from as well that would adopt a similar model, and is there a way to do that? So I wrote a mission plan up, sent that to the denomination, and said, I'd like to go do this.
Wes:And they said, it's great. We love the plan, but oh my goodness. You don't like the but after that. You're 29 years
T.J.:old. It undoes. That but undoes everything that was said before it.
Wes:Yeah. But I was totally I just knew they were gonna buy into it because it's a need. Right? Church is dwindling. Denomination is dwindling.
Wes:We don't have this. We need this. They've gotta be on board. Here's somebody that's passionate about it. They'll go with it.
Wes:But they're like, you're 29, and you're divorced. We don't think that's the best thing. Mhmm. 1 week before I was out of money and was gonna have to take those few belongings that I have and move back to Tennessee and live in my parents basement, the denomination said, We can't find anybody else foolhardy enough to try it. Why don't you try it?
Wes:And understand I'm not a church planer, I don't have the temperament for a church planer or whatever, I'm a plan the work, work the plan. Went to, Nyack College in New York, went to a seminar to learn how to plant churches using a model that gathers the church using direct mail and telemarketing, and we implemented that and, used that to plant a church here in the Dallas Fort Worth area. I wanted to put it in a certain place. The denomination wanted to put it in another. We capitulated to that and the like.
Wes:So we did that, the church grew. We got to about a 125, a 140, but the great thing about it, and to me, to to this day, it's the most significant thing that I've ever been able to be a part of, is that nobody that went to that church had ever been to church before, or was de churched or totally turned off to church. We weren't reshuffling the chairs on a titanic situation. This was not sheep stealing from other church. Everybody.
Wes:Because we would pick up the phone, and we'd call every every person that lived in this city of Rowlett that was a growing, suburban city, and we'd say, first of all, are you actively involved in a local church at the present time? If they said yes, we said, great. Stay there. If they said no, would you be interested in receiving information about a new church that's coming to your area? If they said yes, we'd take their name out and we'd send them those four mailings that led up to our launch week.
Wes:We had been told that your launch week will be a certain size, yada yada, and, that the next week, you can expect about 40%, 50 to 40% to come back, and that's the way it was. We had a big week, about a 100. We came the 1st week, and then it dropped down to 45, and we started treading water. We got up to within 5 years, to about a 150. Like I say 145, 175 is probably more accurate, that were a part of it.
Wes:We did not have the denomination name on the sign. You can imagine the resistance we got about that. I did not wear a robe. We sang contemporary music, but we got a lot of resistance. Presbytery and the denomination as well, and, the denomination decided through their task force that they wanted to go a different direction.
Wes:I went into a quarterly task force meeting and went out without a job. Didn't see it coming.
T.J.:Mhmm.
Wes:Angry at God, shaking my fist at the denomination. What do I do? So I go to a workshop, a career workshop. I decide I don't wanna do traditional ministry anymore. I'm done with it.
Wes:I I go to this workshop at this Baptist church. This gentleman's up there, you know, and I thought he's gonna give me in in in one hour how to get a job and by Friday, and it it doesn't do this. He's he's talking his his, his classes on accepting the x, getting by the y. Okay? It's about processing why you're in the condition you're in, why you've been let go from what you're going.
Wes:I didn't really wanna deal with that, but it was really necessary, and he knew that. I went up to him afterwards, told him who I was. It was interesting because, there had been a government project that had been slotted for the Dallas Fort Worth area which was a super collider which was some sort of neutron accelerator, whatever government was funding it, and it had gone belly up because of funding. And I was actually sitting at the table with physicists, And I felt strangely warm that they were out of work with me, but I went up to this guy afterwards and I said, hey. I'm out of work.
Wes:Thank you for your process. Could you help me? And for whatever reason, he took pity on me. And he said, you're a pastor. You don't fit into the process of this, So I'll work with you independently.
Wes:Pro bono with without charge. He is my business partner today. His name is John McDorman. John ran me through a series of exercises to do self discovery, encouraging me to be a good steward of my competence. And after getting through all of that and understanding how God had wired me up, what my passions are, and all that type of thing, he said, Now what do you wanna do?
Wes:I said, I wanna go out and do a marketplace ministry. I wanna get out there in the collision of life and sow seeds of the gospel with people that are far from God. I think that's the next frontier is the business world. He said, great, we don't have to reinvent the wheel, there's a company already doing that, it's called Marketplace Ministries. They deploy, sec they deploy chaplains into secular businesses nationwide.
Wes:So I'm like, yeah. But I I kinda have my own thing that I wanna do, and I kinda push that off to the side. He asked me going with him to a bible study of men that are in business. I got to know them over about a 6 week period. After we left the meeting one day, a gentleman came out and put an envelope under my, arm and said, hey.
Wes:You ought to check out this company. I think it's perfect for you. And I opened it up, and it's the same company, Marketplace Ministry. I'm kinda dimmed that way. You have to get through with repetitive stuff.
Wes:So 2 strikes, one more strike, I'm out. I'm like, okay, god. I get it. This is before the Internet, so I call them up. They mail me a an application.
Wes:They say, we don't have any openings right now, but we'll keep it on the old we'll keep it on file. I fill it out. I take it back to them. I take it to the front desk, and they say, Interestingly, we just had some people resign. Let me go back and talk to our manager right now.
Wes:So they they bring the Dallas manager in, and he says, yeah. Can we have a conversation? So I ended up he's like, I we have 4 hours that we can offer you. It's not much, but it's a start. Well, I went from 4 hours to 16 hours to ultimately being full time and eventually becoming their national administrative director, being a chaplain deployed out there.
Wes:Again, I wasn't the best chaplain in the world because I'm not the best pastor. My administrative skills got used more and more. This is going on a lot longer, but this is just the journey that it goes on. While we were in this season of our life, we started going to a non denominational church. That church had sold its property and replanted its church, and they were meeting in a high school.
Wes:The pastor was an entrepreneurial mindset, I mean, he could he just could start anything, but he can't organize anything. He was really frustrated with the worship process. He knew I had a passion about worship, so he asked me to come alongside and see if I could help him fix that. We did, and he said, can you come alongside full time and help me out? And I said, yeah.
Wes:All this light and all this salt, I'm only I'm not gonna like that. I'll do it for 3 years and out, see if we can blow this thing up. And I'm not gonna wanna be in here because I don't wanna be around people that are far from God. I stayed there 5 years. We did blow it up.
Wes:We got to 3 services, about 1400 on the weekend. We moved into a new building right after I left that we had bought. It was a pretty remarkable thing that we were able to do. So then I jump and I go back to my partner and say, I wanna get back out in the business world, and he comes to me and says, why don't you come work for me at Transition Consulting? And I go, well, I don't think I have any credibility in the business world.
Wes:A chaplain's one thing, but an HR consultant's another thing.
T.J.:Mhmm.
Wes:And he says, do you know pain? Oh, yeah. I know pain well. Do you know change? Oh, yeah.
Wes:I know change. Do you know struggle and transition? Yeah. He says, well, they're clueless on how to handle that, and they will pay you good money to coach them through that. I said, but I'm still I'm a kingdom guy.
Wes:Can I do that for churches? He says, you can go for it, but you'll never make any money at it. They're not gonna pay you the same level. They're not gonna put you on retainer. You'll never you're just never well, I wanna try it.
Wes:Well, I did try it. It didn't work. And there's a longer story that goes to this, but in the end, that's what I've done ever since then. I got a few engagements, and then, he handed off a few things to me. And today, about 75 at least, traditionally, about 75% of what I've done has been in secular world, which allows me to deeply discount what I do for churches either pro bono or at a or at a half ministry rate, that we do.
Wes:And, yeah, that's kinda how I I mean, it's just it's just kind of, I don't know, it's just kind of following the next step in the faith. Again, understanding who I was, what I'm best at, what gives me the desire. I love being out there in the collision of life, like I say, and sowing those seeds of gospel, to people that are far from God. It's a it's a it's just an in incredible, thing to do. You know, between where a person is or where an organization and where it needs to be, there's always a wilderness.
Wes:That's that transition. The best person that's ever written on change, wrote that it's not change that will do you, and it's the transitions that will kill you. Change is inevitable. Change is even necessary. It's how you manage the change that will ultimately do you in.
Wes:And so between the bondage to what is and the preferred future that God has to you, between your Egypt and your promised land, there's always a wilderness. And I have spent candidly so much of my life in that wilderness that I kind of know what the predictable crises are, I know the lay of the land, And so I decided at that point in my life, I was 43 years of age, that I wanted to devote the rest of my life to helping organizations and people in transition. I've done that for job seekers with the job seekers workshop that I led for 16 years, and we've done that in our in our business ever ever since then. I would love to have a promised land job, my feet up on the desk, corner office, getting a predictable salary, but that's not my calling. Mhmm.
Wes:My calling is in the wilderness. How do I get you from point a to point b? From bondage to what is to that preferred future, it's predictable. Every church goes through it. Every organization goes through it.
Wes:How do I know that? There are 4 books of the Bible devoted to that. The whole mission and ministry of the exodus, of Moses, if you just study that, everything that goes in life transition, you'll see it all happen there. It's unbelievably predictable.
T.J.:Now, Wes, you told me that you were an introvert, But I have been sitting back and taken this ride with you through your life, man. You have just punched it through from start to finish.
Wes:And I'm maybe being an over talker now. I'm going to the filter and ages, release my filter. There's a lot more I could've said. Alright. I try I try to tell you the truth and nothing but the truth, but not the god awful truth.
T.J.:There was a point in your life that you were saying where the first church that you served was exploding and growing and experiencing change, positive change, while inwardly in your own personal life was a different type of conflict, a different type of explosion, a different an an erosion almost. You know, a a crisis. Yeah. How did you juggle both of those? And and how did your faith speak to that?
T.J.:That? Because professionally, if you wanna look at ministry as a vocation, as a profession, it appears to be going well, but inside, you were experiencing loss. How did you not split apart, split in 2?
Wes:By the grace of God and, again, by the loving grace and ministry of that congregation at the time. I'm so indebted to them in my faith walk as well as in my career for just the way that they helped me handle that because I didn't handle it well. I was not equipped to handle that. I never experienced failure in my life. And I took it very personally.
Wes:You know? There's a difference. You know? Failing failure is an event. It's not a person.
Wes:It's a it's a retreat. It's not a defeat. And so having to you know, it's just been over years of having enough failure like that, to kinda understand that. You know? When I was at First Cumberland, we had a youth director that wanted encourage me to memorize the book of James with him.
Wes:He left before we got all the way through. We got the 4 4 chapters of it, and this is before the NIV. So we learned it in the King James. Well, in the first chapter, it says, count it all joy when you fall into diverse temptations, meaning trials, knowing this at the trying of your faith works patience. And let patience have a perfect work in you that you may be perfect and entire, lacking nothing.
Wes:But if you begin at the end of that verse and work backward, what that means, if we're gonna be complete and mature in Christ, we gotta go through some stuff. God uses those times. I'm grateful for the wilderness. That's the most important time that ever happened in my life because I found out, you know what? God is sufficient.
Wes:You gotta live in 24 hour compartments. I can be certain that he's a guide in front of me and a guard behind me. And I don't need to look too far in the future, and I don't need to worry about the past. He's got today. Sufficient under the day is the evil thereof.
Wes:Seek first the kingdom. That's what I needed to do. I just didn't need to do that. They, you know, I for years, I would go, you know, what is your will, God? You know, as if and people ask me that all the time, probably as pastor there.
Wes:How do I how do I discover God's will? Well, it's not lost, first of all. It's not something you have to find. Okay? Jesus didn't say, I will show you the way.
Wes:I will show you the truth. I'll show you the he said, I am the way. You find God, you find the way. Okay? So it's just you walk with God in the next 5 minutes.
Wes:You don't have to worry about what's farther down the path. We always want God to illuminate, oh, God, show me where I need to be in 5 years from now or whatever it happens to be. He's a light unto our path. He's a lamp unto our feet. That's all.
Wes:Okay? Our the main thing in life, as someone said, is not to discern what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand. And these seasons of transition, pain, and struggle in my life have shown me God's sufficiency, His sovereignty, and just the joy of following Him in the moment. That was the takeaway for me because I didn't do it well at the time, and it's just been an evolving process. When the, when the new church development ended and that great high that we were on and it just seemed to melt out from under me.
Wes:I didn't handle my angle very well. I was playing on a coed softball team, which forgive me for those that I'm gonna offend. I'll try to be an equal opportunity offender here. But, I mean, I was a college athlete. I was playing on a church coed softball team.
Wes:I don't know if you know what that means. That means that a girl has to bat in front of you. So even if she gets on base and you hit it to the fence, you have to wait on her to run around the bases, and you, arrogantly, could go around the bases twice. And we had a terrible team. Coed team, terrible team, we're finally winning a game.
Wes:1st game of the season that we're ahead. There's a time limit on the game. I'm out in left field. Probably appropriate that he's out in left field. There's a clock out there, and we get the last out right before it clicked for the time to be over.
Wes:But the umpire at the plate, and I'm a sports official today, I didn't handle this well, declares that the game is over. I go ballistic. I run-in. I'm using all the I mean, not the small four letter words. I'm talking the big letter word.
Wes:I'm letting them I get my bat. I'm slamming it on the ground. I'm chasing these, officials down as they're trying to lead the field, and I'm just everybody's scattered. Nobody on my team wants to have anything to do with me. I mean, it's just insane.
Wes:And finally, a uniformed police officer starts to walk for towards me, and I realize, maybe I need to leave now. So I walk to the car, get in the car, try to put my keys in the ignition, and I'm shaking so bad. I I can't do it. My wife has to put them in for me. And I and it was a wake up call for me because that was not about a baseball game.
Wes:That was not about a softball game. That was about feeling disrespected and being let go in that other position and not handling my anger very, very well. Only, again, by the grace of God did I not lose my marriage, did I not lose my step kids who said, hey. We don't like being around Wes. It's walking on eggshells.
Wes:It's just hard to be with right now, that irritability that comes when you have that type of thing. Again, God has used those seasons of my life, my failures personally and professionally, to really create the ministry that I have today. He turned my cars into somebody else's star. My pain has become other people's gains. I go do for others what I've had to learn through God doing that for me.
T.J.:Were those big changes for you, or were they little incremental changes day by day, minute by minute?
Wes:They were incremental. You know, I'd like to say I I used to say if I when I first got in the ministry, if I don't have it all together by the age of 29, I'm getting out. Well, I'm 65, and I'm still finite, flawed, and fouled up. And I go to bed at night just like, okay, god. You know, just breathing out all that ways I blew it today.
Wes:So we don't have to have it together. That's not you know, we are sinners saved by grace. So, yeah, it's I'd like to think I have it more together today, but, it's just been, I I learned the hard way.
T.J.:Wes, you've been ordained as a Cumberland Presbyterian minister for 40 years, since 1982. Yep. And for several of those years, you've been kinda on the outskirts, the fringes of the Cumberland Presbyterian denomination. Mhmm. But here lately, you're becoming more involved.
T.J.:For example, in 2023, the start of 2023, you'll be the state clerk for Red River Presbyterian. Yeah. So as someone who has been on the edges of the church, of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, what are your observations? And then, the second half of that question is, what are your observations now? You have a perspective giving you a little more context and an opportunity to think.
T.J.:You have a perspective of being part of it, but not in the middle or the center. Well, I guess, through new church development, you were in the center Yeah. But then on the edges again. So what observations have you made about this denomination?
Wes:But most of my exposures, TJ, have been outside the denomination to fast growth, high profile megachurches. Mhmm. I mean, I have a church right now that I've there's a client of mine. They'll have 60 to 80000 people a month in attendance in their 7 locations, and that's not including their expansive worldwide, media, kind of reach. So, I mean, there's nothing that parallels what's in our church.
Wes:So it's been interesting to be a part of those types of churches and have all those exposures, and then just watch our denominations struggle and decline. Before we started recording this, TJ and I were talking about the decade of the eighties where the General Assembly of the Commonwealth Presbyterian Church went on an initiative to intercept some atrophy that had been going on in our denomination and see if we could grow, and maybe recover a a a a sense of being more evangelistic. And it was a very, it worked. I mean, we grew for a while. Now we've we've shrunk back down.
Wes:So, you know, it's hard to I love the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. It's the rock from which I was hewn. It's the quarry from which I'm dug. I'm going to heaven today because of its impact and influence on my life. I love its theology.
Wes:I love the relationships I have in it from seminary that still remain. And I'm not concerned about it. I mean, it's in a microcosmic way. It's experienced with the church with the big c is happening everywhere. I mean, it's particularly in the west.
Wes:The most recent position, I went to work for my largest nonprofit client for 2 years to transition them after an executive leadership change, see if I could harmonize and accelerate the growth of the organization. It was a a global media ministry that was broadcasting 13,000 times a week in every time zone, every second of the day in 26 different languages. And, you know, it was just interesting seeing what they do and then seeing how our church is just kind of limping along right now. I'm just kinda spinning my my wheels a little bit, not here because I just wanna see what I wanna wanna actually say. Love the denomination.
Wes:Love all of that. But it's almost unrecognizable from who we were at the beginning of our denomination. Sometimes I've had the thought, maybe it devolves into a fear that we've become like the the denomination we pulled away from in 18/10. Now that's that's broad brushing it because, again, there's pockets and differences all within the denomination. But when I look back at the history of our denomination, it's very convicting.
Wes:Please don't read people called Cumberland Presbyterian or McDonald's History of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church because you'll be really convicted. I mean, we don't want to spend 4 hours at presbytery, much less travel by horseback or wagon for days, and then spend days at presbytery. Or you wouldn't wanna plant a church by you know, it's interesting. I live near I one of the churches that I, did an a transition pastor, an interim pastor with is a is one of the churches in the Dallas Fort Worth area. It's Mesquite Common Presbyterian Church.
Wes:We used it. It has 40 people maybe on a good Sunday come in there today. It used to have 3 churches. You know how they decided where to where to plant a church? They would hitch a wagon, drive it for 8 hours, and where it stopped, that's where we'd plan the church.
Wes:And you know how that works in the Cubans. We used to have that 5 mile radius or whatever happened to be, but they would start churches with an elder. That's something you would hear in Cocoa Valley, but you won't find that here. It was all about that pioneering spirit that was so much a part of The Cumberland Church in the beginning has been lost. That evangelistic aspect of who we were.
Wes:I don't see that passion anymore. We're distracted with social justice and other types of things. Those are important, but they're not essential. They're not the great commission that Christ left at our feet to do. When I when I look at the the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, and it's again pioneering, evangelistic, biblical.
Wes:You know, we've never been dogmatic, but we've always been doctrinal. We avoid kinda getting on the extremes, that middle theology, whatever it happens to be, we don't have to figure out the sovereignty of God and the free will of man. We go, well, that's, candidly, that's above our pay grade. We think both are involved, but we're not gonna get dogmatic about it. Is Christ coming back?
Wes:Yeah. But we're not gonna put it down today and time and how it's gonna happen and all that type of thing. But we've always been biblical, the only infallible rule of faith and practice, the authoritative guide for what we should believe and what we should do. And we've always been an intimate church. We've always been small, mostly rural, mostly southeast.
Wes:And I want us to get that I would love for us to redig those old wells because I think we've lost that. You know, in the beginning, because we were, a function of the second great awakening, We're Presbyterian in name. We're Presbyterian in polity, but we're not really Presbyterian in theology, and we're not really Presbyterian in worship. The initial church that the Cumberland Church in its early years was Low Church. They didn't wear robes.
Wes:They didn't have high liturgy. They didn't use all this fancy stuff that we use today. We've become more that way. And I'm not saying that's bad because I love I love everything from plassee words to to free call and response, black worship. I love that.
Wes:The greatest moments of my life have all been in worship, private and public. I love worship. But all that's to being said said is I'm interested to see what God's gonna do in this next generation. Again, in every crisis, there exists an opportunity. The crisis going on right now in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church excites me because we have an opportunity to reorient our lives, to define our to redefine our mission, to, orient it again around our passion.
Wes:Maybe it's to recover our roots. I don't know where it's all gonna go, but it's gonna go somewhere. And I'm glad there's kind of this turmoil because it's gonna come out somewhere. Will there be loss? Probably.
Wes:There's never change without loss. For everything you've gained, you've lost something. For everything you've gained, you'll always lose something. It's the nature of transition, but it's forcing us. Culture's forcing us to figure out who we are gonna be and who we're gonna be for the next generation.
Wes:Mine is the generation that's going away. The boomer church in many ways, has done a disservice to to Christianity in the west. We've created these monolithic kingdoms of cool with motion lighting and fog machines and skinny jeans and product in their hair and celebrity pastors, and I was intoxicated with that for a while. That doesn't work anymore. That attractional model, those those churches may not even exist 50 years from now.
Wes:We've had our heads in the sand in the church in the West. Pre COVID, candidly, only about 13 to 17 percent of the American population was in church on a given Sunday. Over the last 10 years, all the churches that have asked me to consult with them keep asking the same question, What's happened to the 18 to 9 to 29 year olds? If they came up through the church, they go away to college, and they never come back. Well, when you talk about the 18 to 29s and even younger, even less than that are going to church in America.
Wes:I had a young man when there was a large this large church that was indicated about before, megachurch in the Dallas Fort Worth area, was starting to go to the multi site model. They had tapped the guy on the shoulder that they wanted to be their 1st campus pastor, and they asked me to mentor him in leadership. First thing I did was do a personality profile on him and found out he was not well suited to do what they wanted to do. And so I said, so what is what do you what is your calling? What does God want you to do?
Wes:What does he want you to be? And he said, I wanna go to England and start a church and start a movement to reach millennials over there. I'm like, seriously? You're a Southern Baptist from Dallas, Texas. You have no idea what you're about to go working.
Wes:But, again, he's 29, and he's all courageous and hopeful, and he figures he can do anything. And he's kinda got that personality anyway. But I said, you're gonna get there and find out you're gonna have to unlearn everything you thought you knew about evangelism. Because there's only about 3% of the people over there that are going to church. We did a a tour over there, my wife and I, of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales some years ago, and the, the guide was from Scotland, and he said there's some belief that the Church of Scotland won't even exist in 50 years.
Wes:But you know what? TJ, they're figuring it out. Rather than being worried about petty disagreements or secondary issues of doctrine, they're reaching across lines, and Charismatics and Catholics and, Presbyterians and Anabaptists are all getting together because the enemy is not the other churches that are taking market share away from them. The enemy is those that are leading people to self destruction, and we need to be getting the gospel of God's grace and love out to those people. We need to cooperate in ways that we do that, and they're finding ways to join hands and to do that types of thing.
Wes:That's gonna be America 50 years from now if we don't figure it out. That's gonna be the Cumberland Church if we don't figure it out. But again, it's not new. We don't teach people very well. We're so swamped with all of this, we're so inundated with media that we start to think like the culture thinks.
Wes:We need to be leading our people to think biblically, to think theologically, and think historically. Right after the American Revolution, 10% of the people were going to church. So what happened? There was an awakening, so I'm not worried about the church. I'm not worried about the Cumberland Church.
Wes:God's either gonna raise up a new generation of young leaders that will be the impetus for meaningful change and growth, or Jesus is gonna come back. And I'm really good with that too, because, I mean, our world has kinda gone crazy with the polarization that's going on today, so I'm not I'm not too worried about that. I think God's I think he's got this. I will build my church. It's his church, and he'll take care of it.
Wes:If that's the common church, I don't know. Sometimes I think the the church that's most like the origins of our denomination is outside the United States, not within the United States. So that's kinda where I feel about it.
T.J.:You sent me a few scriptures ahead of time that are meaningful to you, And one of them was Romans 1520, that it stands out as a a life calling for you, Wes.
Wes:Yeah. Romans
T.J.:15/20 says, it has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on someone's foundation. What is it about the scripture that resonates with you?
Wes:This excites me. That's who I am. It's who God wired me up to be. So it would keep me talking till midnight and get me up early in the morning to do that other thing. I'm not a maintenance guy.
Wes:I'm not a make nice guy. I wish I were. I would love to have on my tombstone lover, but he's not a lover. It's not what I I I I I love I love to be around people that are far from God. I mean, they're not the the I don't perceive unbelievers as the enemy.
Wes:I perceive them as the victims of the enemy. And I want so much that old, song that we learned in camp meetings, pass it on. I wish for you, my friend, this happiness that I've known. You can depend on him wherever you're bound. So I just I just wanna go get in real I wanna build authentic relationships of integrity with unbelievers.
Wes:That's what led me to become a basketball referee. I was in a season where I felt I had no contact, not enough contact with the unbelieving world. I was able to do that in my business, but there's some boundaries that have to be done there. So I had heard somebody say, find something you love to do and go do it with people that are far from God. And I'm like, well, I'm no good at playing basketball anymore.
Wes:Kinda lost all my hops and everything. So somebody suggested, why don't you go be a sports official? And so I saw that as a ministry, and everybody can do that. It can be a book club. It can be a PTA meeting, a membership drive for your kid's high school band, or I don't know whatever it happens to be.
Wes:But just, again, find something you love to do and go do that's that's evangelism in the next generation. It's it's it's, my favorite book on evangelism is actually lifestyle evangelism. That might be a conversation for another time by Joe Aldrich, which used the hierarchies, pyramid of needs to kind of, show how evangelism is different based on where people are in that hierarchy and the and the like. But in in today's world, radical generosity and radical hospitality through engagement, We have to engage with culture. The church has always been a counter cultural organization.
Wes:And now that the winds of culture are no longer blowing favorably in the west, and the church is losing its influence, we're in a post truth, post Christian environment, the church needs to recover its for it needs to recover a 1st generation faith. Not only our denomination of 1st generation CP faith, but just the church in the west, a 1st generation faith that's, you know, I always often say there's no, no impact without contact. You cannot impact a world that you have no contact with, and that's a hard thing in churches because we become insular. You have to find ways to encourage your people to send them out when they leave that service to be intentional about building those relationships. Over time, because it's not a transaction again, the old 4 spiritual laws that I learned in doing that still has its moments, but typically it's loving them until some major prop in their life is pulled out from under them.
Wes:And when everybody else walks in, you walk in. When everybody else walks out, you walk in, and you'd be able to share the gospel with them just a testimony of the difference God's made. Bring them to a harvest event. Bring them to church. Bring them into fellowship with you.
Wes:The gentleman that I had that went to England found out that I was absolutely right. He had churches, abandoned Anglican churches, and the Anglican church was saying, use any of our abandoned churches. And he said, I don't want to because they have a perception in the community, and I don't want that to be an impediment. So he ended up building a pub ministry on Friday nights where a section of the pub would be balled out and he would just let people get together and spout their pop psychology, their pop theology because everybody has a belief system whether they recognize it or not, and just slowly over time, build relationships with it, find where their pain is, find where their dreams are because that's the point of contact with the gospel in them, and slowly kind of challenge their thinking on why they believe what they believe and the vacuity of those types of things. And that's how he built his movement over there, which ended up being, called the awakened movement.
Wes:It was a great thing that happened. So that's how evangelism will have to be in this general. We got to get in relationship with people over time to do that.
T.J.:Let's talk about the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. We've hit on some of the things in terms of our weakness. Let's talk about some of our current strengths. What do you see? What do you observe that are current strengths for the Cumberland Presbyterian Church and the Christian church in general?
Wes:Well, our strength is Christ, obviously. We we have the you know, our world is crazy. Our world lives up here on the surface. You know? It's
T.J.:But let me use the word when I say strength. Let me say in terms of gifts, attributes
Wes:Yeah. Okay.
T.J.:Skills.
Wes:Yeah. Yeah. Well, again but if we talk about culture as well and engaging culture well, We've we've kinda drank the Kool Aid, and we've become polarized as well, and we don't need to do that. But, maybe I'll I'll pull away from that for a second. So in a post truth, post Christian world in the west, The key issues that are even being talked about in culture are identity, purpose, and meaning.
Wes:Seriously? Who better to address those things than the church of Jesus Christ? Every time I have an individual client that I triage when I'm bringing them on, I ask them questions to find out 4 things. What's your history? What's your identity?
Wes:What's your community? And what's your destiny? Well, the Christian faith, the gospel relates to all those. Mhmm. Christ through the cross solved both the sin problem and the death problem.
Wes:He gave us a community of faith to walk alongside us, a healing community, a supportive community. You know, people don't have that intimacy. They don't have that support that they need. So in a world that's searching for identity, meaning, and purpose, and finding those in false things, in substitutes, oh, our god is so much better than what they're substituting him from. They can go from, you know, from lover to lover, from fun fix to fun fix, from concert to concert, from pill to pill to bottle to bottle, but, oh my gosh.
Wes:Let me tell you about this story. Have you heard the story of Jesus? And that's not been heard. More and more people are growing up without a Christian memory with no idea of that, and so we have to go out and tell tell that story. So the church is well positioned, I think, for a revival and, again, the Cumberland Presbyterian Church.
Wes:And one of the things that helps the Cumberland Church is our smallness in many ways. Again, I think that the next generation of the church in the west will be micro churches, small churches. We may get together for large gatherings, but that's really where the church is the church. We're not gonna be able to afford property, and the church may not get tax breaks in the future well down the line somewhere. Don't know what when that might be, but Yeah.
T.J.:We were you and I were talking about that off mic, that, one of the strengths that Cumberland Presbyterian Church has is our size, locally our size, and denominationally. And, we see it as a detriment, but it's actually a gift. Because if we're talking about relationships, as you and I have been doing this morning, then we're talking about building trust and relationships 1 by 1 by 1. It's harder to do when you have large groups of people. You had mentioned a congregation that you're working with at 60, 70,000 people per month or whatever, which describes the membership of our entire denomination.
T.J.:But if the if the point of that group is to reach out through many different languages, so many times per second or minute or whatever it is, then, you know, kudos to them. But I would push back on that and go, what are we doing as individuals and in small groups? Because that's where the relationships are built. I find it interesting when we talk about the local church or denomination or other denominations, we almost painted in a in a consumer consumer
Wes:Yeah.
T.J.:Picture of like, this is what we are. It's almost like we're not talking about something to be consumed.
Wes:Right.
T.J.:I think our perceptions of the church and our discipleship should be examined and discerned. If we're talking about identity and purpose and meaning are areas that people are exploring. Because we can help people find big shiny objects that have the latest tech Yep. That have the biggest groups, the best climate controlled environments, the easiness to move in and out of the group. But I believe discipleship with Jesus Christ is more than just that.
T.J.:No. It is more than that. And I think where we need to be as Christians is building the trust among our neighbors, our friends, our coworkers, and our families so that we can have deep conversations about faith that lead to purpose and to meaning and to identity. Yeah. We have that ability as Cumberland Presbyterians.
Wes:We do. We do. There's been the craft movement. Everybody has a craft beer, or everything's artisanal. It's interesting how things are shrinking in that way.
Wes:And, well, that's the Cumberland Church. We're we're we're craft no. We're not the craft beer of the Christian world. No. That's not the right way to say it.
Wes:But you know what I'm saying In the sense, it's not one's bad and one's not bad. It's just they're just different. The the large churches are great at reaching the unreached. When I talk about identity, meaning, and purpose, that's really for unbelievers. But we're we have been tasked with building disciples.
Wes:Make disciples. Go and make disciples. How well are we stewarding that mission? So as a pastor or as leaders in a church, you have to look at yourself and saying, how how well are we doing that? The people that we're putting out in the world, are they leaving this place and stewarding their lives in such a way that they are loving God and living for him in all the roles and relationships of their life.
T.J.:But, Wes, I think that's where we get the metrics are wrong. The perspectives are wrong, is you're saying sending people out Yeah. When leadership in the church is saying, how do we get people in? So the metrics are numerical growth. And I think the metrics need to change, as in the growth is deeper discipleship, equipping people to be able to share the good news in natural ways and in regular day, everyday experiences.
Wes:The byproduct Yeah.
T.J.:Is the numerical growth. But there has to be a complete cultural shift or the horizon needs to change because the goal is numerical growth, survival. And I think that is what we need to be focusing on. And I think we have the skill set. We have the gifts.
T.J.:We have the ability to invite people to a very meaning relationship with with Jesus Christ.
Wes:Yeah. It's a it's a hard one. Obviously, you gotta have numbers too. So, you know, we it's people tend to devolve. They're either all going or all making disciples.
Wes:They're baptizing and teaching them to observe. So we're we're using on one side of the great commission, and we have to be on both sides. We still have to be engaging culture, teaching our people how to do that, both collectively as a church and individually as believers within the church. We need to be doing that. But, I mean, if you think about the 1st century church, it was just God set these people on fire, and wherever they went, they took the gospel with them.
Wes:And they used the crises Cumberland Presbyterian Church if they're not been to digital, if they're not been Cumberland Presbyterian Church if there not been to digital, if there not been COVID? So in the crisis of COVID even, the opportunity was it forced some of us to learn how to leverage, technology for greater impact within the church and even outside the church. Now we gotta figure out how to do that in balance because again, as we talked off mic, discipleship will always be analog. That's in relationship, in community is how it happened. There can be a download initially for a new believer of essential truths and bible teaching, but, spiritual growth is not a download.
Wes:It's not linear. It's on a need to know basis, and the only way you do that is when you're in a small group and somebody's having a crisis of belief or a crisis of career or a crisis of confidence, and you come alongside them, and you you learn to think biblically, think theologically, and and then and hold them up as they get through it like people did for me in every difficult season in my life.
T.J.:Right. And that can't be done in a 150 characters.
Wes:Yeah. It, you know. I know.
T.J.:It can't it can't be done with a short 2 to 3 minute video. No. No. There has to be human interaction.
Wes:It has to be analog. It's gotta be. Gotta be. We're I told you we're we're deformed in our relationships. We're transformed in relation and we're re we're we're deformed in relationship, but we're also transformed in relationships too.
T.J.:Wes, when you encounter people who are not in relationship with God, who have yet to begin a relationship, How do you share with them where God's presence is in your life in this moment?
Wes:Well, it's not really all about me. It's all about them. So, again, I have to work out of the context to who they are. I've gotta try to lead to spiritual conversations and build a platform to actually speak into their life by showing that I care about them. Mhmm.
Wes:But there's always occasions, like, there was a and I don't do this often because I'm not a confrontational type of person. But I was in Chattanooga a couple of years ago, and my brother and sister-in-law took me to a new barbecue place that I've never been to before. And a young girl that was waiting on us at taking our order, I said, hey. I'm new. What's best here?
Wes:And she told me what was new and what what they had and what was good and all that type of thing. So I made my order, and she says, do you have any other questions? And I don't know why, but I just said, yeah. And, again, this gets back to kind of something we've already talked about. I said, don't be freaked out by what I'm about to say.
Wes:But I said to her, she's about 24 22, 24. I looked at her and I said, what's the meaning of life? And it's a full restaurant, and there's a pause. And then she looks at me and just goes, I wish I knew. And I said, well, that's an important question to figure out.
Wes:And the bigger question is what's the meaning of your life, and you won't know that one until you figure out the other one. Now that's a little bit safari evangelism, and I don't like to, you know, kind of sideswipe them like that, but it's planting a seed. I was in a why does everything happen in a restaurant? But I was I was standing in line at a seafood restaurant to place my order one day, and there was this little fidgety preschooler, holding on to her mother's hand. She turns around and looks up to me, I mean, all 77 inches in me, all 6 foot 5, she says, Do you know Jesus?
Wes:He's my best friend. And I went, Oh my gosh, she has no idea. I'm an ordained minister, and I never turned around and had the courage to say that to anybody in my life. Well, she's 4 years old. She can get away with it.
Wes:Mhmm. But why haven't I just told people that?
T.J.:Yeah.
Wes:Why don't I do do you know Jesus? He's my best friend. I'm like, gosh. So, for me, it's it's looking for those molten moments when I can speak into their life, but I gotta have to find out who they are and really where their needs are, and and you kinda have to listen to them a long time to to get to that point.
T.J.:Yeah. Less talking, more listening.
Wes:Or a traumatic event happens in their life, and then you can speak into that. And you got you first ask permission. Would you be interested in hearing from me my story about something that made a big difference in my I mean, we don't have any trouble recommending a a dentist or a movie or whatever it happens to be, but we hold the keys. I mean, we've got this world that's all up on racism and classism, but those are symptoms of a deeper problem, and that's a sin problem. I mean, one of the reasons I came to faith might have been fire insurance back in that little tiny church on the border of Tennessee and Alabama because I wasn't sure I was going to heaven, but I'm still a Christian today, and I wake up committed to that because it answers all the basic questions of life.
Wes:Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? And I can find that out in the first three pages of the manual. I don't even have to read the first book.
Wes:If I just read the first three chapters of the Bible of Genesis, I figure all of that out.
T.J.:Why is that, Wes? Why are we so free with photos of children and grandchildren or our favorite sports team or movie or something that we've watched streaming? At times, uninvited. No one asked. And yet, we are reluctant to share our faith.
Wes:It's just fear. It's the fear of being labeled as a fanatic. Oh, wait. That's what they call a fan. Well, I'm a fan of Jesus Mhmm.
Wes:Or just being labeled as something you don't wanna be labeled. And it's just it's a false impediment. It's false expectation appearing real, and there's just a right way and a wrong way to do it. Just sharing your personal story of faith, Can I tell you my story? I mean, that's just probably the best thing that you can do, and you gotta know your personality.
Wes:There's only about 1 out of every 10 people that you pass in a church that are real have the gift of evangelism. Most of us just don't. So if you're an introvert like me with a reactive personality, invitational evangelism might be best for you. So inviting a person at the right moment to the right event or the right group or to meet with you with that person that has the gift of evangelism, it might be the best way to do it. So it's invitational evangelism or service evangelism.
Wes:It happens. Sooner or later, you got a call. There is no con impact without contact. There's also no impact without contrast. Oz Guinness said that contrast is the mother of clarity.
Wes:So if you wanna make the Christian life clear to somebody, you can't live like they live. Okay? You have to identify with them without becoming identical to them. Okay? And that's been a balance that we haven't kept in the church.
Wes:Again, boomer church, we went way too over to accommodation to culture, So now we have an audience, but we've lost our message because there's nothing to commend us different than that. And then we've had other periods of times in the Christian faith where we're so isolated from culture that we have no audience, but we got a good solid message where you've gotta be in the middle. Like Jesus, we're the body of Christ, in whom the fullness of the Godhead dwelt full of grace and truth. We have to have grace and truth. And for whatever reason, God has built into all of us a preference for one of them, but we we're called to live out the life of Christ in front of others.
Wes:That's grace and truth. So critical participation in culture matters, so I have to be in the world but not of the world. I have to identify them without being identical to it, So I have to have some contrast in my life. I can't be doing everything that they do, not in a, well, I don't do that. I don't do those types of things.
Wes:But, no, disrespectfully decline from going with them. I'll give that a story related to that. Referee buddies knew I was a believer, knew that was a ministry of mine. I have a college basketball game. We finished the game, and the guys say, why don't you go out with us?
Wes:Well, I wanna reach these guys for Christ. I wanna build a relationship with them. 1 of them was an assistant DA in a county near here. The other guy was a business consultant, big time business consultant. And they say, yeah.
Wes:I say, where do you wanna go? And they said, well, let's go to Twin Peaks. I don't know what Twin Peaks is. I figured it has a mountain theme. We won't go there.
Wes:And so we go to Twin Peaks and I walk in, and, of course, it's a restaurant that caters mostly to a male clientele that has servers that are female and scantily clad. And so what do I do? I can't believe you took me here, you sinners. Do I leave? No.
Wes:I don't leave. I stay. Now I don't order a whole 2 pitchers of beer like they chug chug down that time. I make sure that I look in the eyes of the server and ask about her life rather than try to woo her for, additional time after she gets off work. But I used it as an opportunity to build a relationship.
Wes:I still have strong relationships with those men. If I had not agreed to go, they would just figure I'm at goody 2 shoes. If I would have participated or used the same jokes or terminology they did, I would never be able to speak truth to them because they would go, who are you to tell me? Mhmm. So it's that type of thing that we have to have a balance.
Wes:We gotta be close. So there's no impact without contact, without contrast, but then there's gotta be a conversation eventually. You got to you got to share the words of the gospel.
T.J.:One more question, Wes.
Wes:I'm sorry. Over talking again.
T.J.:I had to think about it. My mind raced as I was trying to figure out the twin peaks and then you
Wes:You're welcome to delete all of that from edit this as needed for a an adult or have it for an adult put a disclaimer at the beginning. This is for adult audiences only.
T.J.:No. I've you went to a restaurant named Twin Peaks.
Wes:That's the real world. That's the world we're calling to reach. Okay? It's they're messy. Okay?
T.J.:Okay. Now I remember my, my question for you. 40 years of ministry. Wes, what do the next 40 years of ministry look like for you?
Wes:Well, when I turned 60, I started praying every day, God, what's the best use for the rest of my life? Again, it's a stewardship issue for me. I don't know how much time I have left till God promotes me. I look forward to the adventure that's ahead in this life and in the next life as well. I just, you know, in COVID, you know, for an introspective type of guy, it really actually, it was good for me because I kinda like being alone, so that's kind of a good thing.
Wes:But I'm like, I wanna live my life more intentionally. I wanna live it more devotionally, and I wanna live it more testimonially. And that has not changed since COVID. That's what kind of my goals when I get up in the morning. I am still wanting to be radically dependent and immediately obedient on God.
Wes:That's the way I was when I first came to faith, And I want that same abandon the call to do anything that I feel or sense the whisper of the holy spirit urging me to do, whether that's walk across a room and engage somebody. I don't know what that happens to be, but I just I just wanna keep praying. God, what's the best use of the rest of my life? Like Samuel says, speak, Lord. Your servant is listening, and I wanna be obedient for that moment.
Wes:I do want it to be intentional. You know, I pray more than I've ever prayed in my life. The value of prayer has gone up so, so much. I mean, prayer was transactional when you're an early Christian, but then as you practice the presence of God, it's an always on relationship, and you're just having this constant dialogue all day. Like, before you get on a podcast, and what do I have to say?
Wes:And it's like, lord, fill my fill my mouth with words, and now I mean, starting to pray, Lord, take some of those words back or whatever. Those are your words. So no. It's just for me at this at this season, it's it's it's, it's the words that Paul put in Acts 20. My aim is to finish the race and complete the task the lord Jesus has given me, the task of testifying to the good news of Jesus Christ.
Wes:So ministry is life. So anybody I'm in front of, I wanna see how I can somehow be light and love to them. That's just what I wanna do. Whether that my world shrinks to just being kids and grandkids or if it continues to grow as my consulting practice is pretty much back up to full speed now, Whatever it is, I just wanna love God and live for him in all the roles and relationships of life. Yeah.
T.J.:Wes, thank you for your fascinating faith journey, very interesting conversation. You've made my part of this conversation really easy because I've just had to ask a couple questions here and there. And I look forward to getting to know you better in the months and the years to come, and I hope God blesses your your ministry now and into the future with your with your work through transitional, consulting, and as a new role as a state clerk for Red River Presbytery.
T.J.:Thank you for listening to the Cumberland Road. If you would, please subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or Google. In my conversation with Wes, he had mentioned the letter of James, and so I thought it was fitting to close with James chapter 1 verse 2. My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its full effect so that you may be mature and complete, lacking in nothing.
