A Fresh Leadership Approach

Ep.5 | Interview with Chris Brown

Hosted by Craig Smith

IN THIS EPISODE

• What it looks like to co-Lead as a Pastor and the principles of Shared-Leadership | 2:07
• Was Chris the guy preaching to the family dog at an early age? | 5:57
• Coming back to the God he loves and watching the genesis of Him using Chris’s gift of communication | 9:28
• Is a Youth Pastor even a “Real Pastor”?- It’s His timeline, not ours | 13:45
• Stretching your thinking | Is the product itself, narrative?!  | 17:01
• When in doubt remember, it’s not the Bible that is boring, it’s the people teaching it that are boring | The Story is Engaging | 21:12
• Don’t seek your audience’s attention, seek their participation | 24:38
• Is it just an uphill battle or is narrative, story telling, preaching making it’s way into the churches of America? | 28:01
• Read the bible like you would any other book, notice how you read Dr. Suess | 30:58
• Live what you preach | 36:48

INSTANT TAKEAWAYS

1 | THE IDEA BEHIND CO-LEADERSHIP

North Coast Church currently has Chris Brown and Larry Osborne as co-teaching pastors or co-lead pastors (they also share their time on stage, and their leadership duties with Chris Hilken). This is an interesting model because it runs counter-intuitive to the basic model of the American Church. Chris lets us peek behind the curtain as to why they’re running their church that was! Their philosophy behind this model is to promote growth and leadership for the staff that call North Coast home. By providing multiple teaching pastors, as Chris puts it, “the young lions don’t have to eat the old lions, or find a new pride to take over.” This also takes a step towards discontinuing the building of a church around a personality, which can be detrimental to the church’s survival if that pastor ever leaves. By focusing on Scripture, and the teachings of Jesus Christ, they’re able to produce an amazing leadership model, which emphasizes the importance on your vertical relationship with Our Father, not the horizontal relationship with who’s on stage.

2 | IF YOU’RE LOOKING TO START SOMEWHERE, START IN ROMANS

This is, as Chris argues, the only book that Paul wrote. The other pieces of literature of his, that are highlighted in the Bible, are various letters that he wrote to the people of the times. Far and away, very applicable today still! Romans though, it’s not a letter written to a church of the time, it’s not a reaction of who slept with you, it’s not accusatory of your actions and immorality of the past. It’s a, “Here’s what you need to know” guidebooks of sorts for Christian Living. Chris argues that the product of the Bible itself is narrative and this is a great example here. By looking at who Paul used to be, and who he is now writing Romans, and the impact Jesus had on transforming his life, it’s incredible.

3 | LET SCRIPTURE BE YOUR NARRATIVE

Every communicator needs to be entertaining or else, why would we bother listening? It’s a common misconception that our attention spans are getting shorter and we’re not able to process or digest long pieces of content or information anymore. Our attention spans are just not held by content that isn’t creative, cultivating, or interesting. Netflix (or really any streaming service) is a great example of this! Netflix is notorious for dropping entire seasons at a time for us to binge, and we happily oblige! We are hungry to consume content that we find relevant and compelling, our tolerance for the noise in our peripheral has just diminished. We are inundated every day with narratives and we’re interested the most in our own story, the story that we’re a part of. Make your sermons come alive, make them consumable.

4 | STOP APOLOGIZING

We serve a spotless God, and what we mean by that is He doesn’t make mistakes. He has called you to preach, to leadership, and that wasn’t by accident. So why are you focusing on your short comings? There’s no reason to dwell on the things that we don’t do well, and question why we are where God has placed us. That’s not to say, that you shouldn’t work on that stuff, you absolutely should! But be who you are. Be who God has called you to be. Stop wasting time on the, “I don’t have this, or I don’t have that” areas of your ministry. Silence the voices in your head telling you that you’re not good enough. He made us and He knows exactly who we are! Embrace that, let Him work through you.

SHOW NOTES

Welcome to our first episode of the 2019 year. On this episode, we welcome in Chris Brown, the co-Lead Pastor from North Coast Church in beautiful San Diego, California. Chris is in a unique role, sharing leadership duties and pastoral roles at the forefront of his church with Larry Osborne (to hear our conversation with Larry, head back to Ep. 1 | Larry Osborne on Dripping Wisdom). Chris is a wonderful leader who is passionate about having fun with your ministry and its direction while being clear on international communicating.

Join us today as Craig and Chris dive into what it looks like to bring people, “into the story” as communicators as well as stressing the importance of fundamental truths. You don’t want to miss this one!