PODCAST | How To Mend What Others Couldn’t (feat. Jon Chasteen)

Resources:

For more information about ReLeader: https://releader.substack.com/

Follow ReLeader on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/The_ReLeader/

To connect with Jon: https://linktr.ee/jonchasteen

Follow Jon on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jonchasteen/

Transcript:

Ivette Naron:

Welcome to the Vanderbloemen Leadership Podcast, where our team talks with top leaders about how to better serve and lead your team. Our goal is for you to gain tangible tips on topics such as culture, leadership, succession, and navigating people problems. We hope you enjoy today's show.

William Vanderbloemen:

Well, hey everybody. So glad to have you meet me here this summer while I'm away, but working as well. And while I'm working away, the magic of Zoom is letting me do a podcast with my good friend Jon Chasteen. Jon's been a friend for several years now, got introduced by this other pastor in Oklahoma named Craig, and Craig knows good people. So Jon, thanks for being a friend, and thanks for taking time today to join us.

Jon Chasteen:

I'm honored to be both, man, honored to be your friend and honored that you'd have me on your podcast.

William Vanderbloemen:

I've tried before doing this podcast to come up with the 140-character descriptor of your journey and what you do, and I can't do it. You've got more job descriptions than... It's pretty amazing. We have so many different listeners. I'd love it if you'd just kind of walk us through a quick here's Jon and what I've been doing and let us see how God's been working in your life.

Jon Chasteen:

Yeah, it'd be hard to do 140 characters. It'd just be like surprise, whatever God's doing next. To do a really quick fast-forward version, my life started in higher education. I was a vice president in higher ed, advancement fundraising. All of my degrees were headed that direction. Doctorate degree in university administration. I wanted to be a president of a college and university. And then in 2011, God... It's a long story that I just won't go into... God just dragged me kicking and screaming into the ministry. Never wanted to be a pastor, never wanted to be in the ministry. Became a campus pastor of the church that we were just attending, that Michelle and I were attending in 2011 called Victory Church in Oklahoma City. Three years later, the lead pastor, great guy, just made a mistake, had a moral failure, and six months later I found myself in that seat. So I'd been a pastor for three years, what would be deemed a mega church, in our definition of that with multiple campuses. Had only preached a handful of times and found myself in the lead pastor's seat in November of 2014.

Did that for four years, some of the hardest four years of my life. And then higher ed world called me, The King's University, founded by Jack Hayford, is in Dallas, Texas, kind of under the covering of Gateway Church. And they called me saying, "Hey, we want you to be the president of our university." And I said, "You're crazy. I can't leave this church. Thanks, but no thanks." And they said, "No, we're okay if you do both." So for the last five years, I've been the lead pastor of the church in Oklahoma City and the president of The King's University and Seminary. That window, that door closed just a few short months ago here at the end of June, actually. I served five years doing that. So now I'm back to just being a pastor. My wife is happy. I have one job. That's kind of my life, is a combo of higher education in the administrative sense as a president and local ministry, local church ministry.

William Vanderbloemen:

I think the way God's used you has a very distinct signature. It seems that you've gone into things that were already in place and had become a bit of a mess, and God used you to say, hey, you're cleanup crew. Let's get this thing restarted. I remember we were sitting in a coffee shop... Gosh, what was it?... not a year ago, but not long. Not much different than a year ago-

Jon Chasteen:

Yeah, last fall, last August or so. Yeah.

William Vanderbloemen:

We were sitting there, yeah, talking about how can you use that to help others? Because, I mean, you can read a lot of different studies, but I think it's faith guess is 80% of all congregations in North America are in some form of stagnation or decline, and they need a boost, a new chapter to break the S-curve, however you want to say it.

Ivette Naron:

How healthy is your team? Our Culture Tool is a comprehensive staff engagement study that will help you build a winning culture. Try it out today at theculturetool.com.

William Vanderbloemen:

Tell us about ReLeader.

Jon Chasteen:

Yeah, so it happened about a little over a year ago. It was last summer, around June. I was with our friend Craig, and we were talking about the idea of how can we help pastors and how can we train up new pastors, lead pastors? And he had this idea of doing some church planting stuff, church growth stuff. And I said, "Man, honestly, pastor Craig, I don't know how to plant churches. My church has done well, but I wouldn't say we've had explosive growth. I'm not even sure I'm the right pastor to mentor pastors on how to grow churches." And he just said, "Well, then what is it that you have done that you can help pastors do?" We were just working out together, and I had this moment of, yeah, what do I do? And I just said, without even thinking... I don't know if you ever talked without thinking before... and without thinking, I said, "I fix broke stuff." I'll never forget. He looked right back at me, and he said, "Then that's what you need to help leaders do." And so I was the lead pastor of a church, president of a university and seminary, and for the first time in my life I realized what I'm called to do.

William Vanderbloemen:

Wow.

Jon Chasteen:

So he helped me kind of come up with this term, ReLeader, because what I experienced in my leadership journey is most leadership content is shaped or crafted towards the entrepreneurial start, grow, build, excel. But there are very few Chris Hodges. There are very few Craig Groeschels. Those are the ones we all look up to as some of the most amazing leaders in the world. But what I realized, and even as I began to look in scripture, there's tons of releaders in scripture. Elisha was a ReLeader. He took over Elijah's mantle. Joshua was a ReLeader. God said, "Moses, my servant is dead. Joshua, take up the mantle and take them into the promised land."

And so what I began to realize is it is a very distinct... Call it a gift, call it an anointing, call it a whatever your denomination word uses... it's a distinction that I believe is there for leadership that there are those who are called to plant, grow, build, start something, and then there are those of us, like myself, who we are, I believe, divinely called and anointed to fix broke stuff, fix stuff that we didn't break, because what I'm aware of when I go into the organizations, whether it be The King's University, Victory Church, a sales job that I had right out of college, I didn't build the building. I didn't hire the staff. I didn't set the values. I didn't do anything. I inherited all of it. And so how do I take culture, how do I inherit a culture and shift it to something that's healthy? How do I inherit a staff that I didn't hire and lead them in a way? How do I turn that ship around without throwing everybody off the ship? So that's what ReLeader became, and it's something that I'm extremely passionate about.

William Vanderbloemen:

Well, I know you're a great writer, and I knew you were working on a book a year ago, but you've got other ideas here, right? So-

Jon Chasteen:

Yeah.

William Vanderbloemen:

I don't want to sound like an infomercial, but I think people would be interested to know, all right, so how do you help me learn how to fix broke stuff?

Jon Chasteen:

Yeah. Yeah, so I think a lot of it is relational. A lot of it is content. A lot of it's mentorship. And I hope that I could provide that in various different formats for people. But there's going to be a lot of different avenues. Right now we're launching a podcast in August, and the title of the podcast is simply ReLeader. I've got a website where you can subscribe, a free subscription for content, for articles, for videos, content like that. And that could be very easily found at just releader.co. That's the website, releader.co. I did write a book that'll release probably around January of '24, and it's just going to be titled ReLeader, and the subtitle is How to Fix What You Didn't Break. Those are kind of my three main channels right now. And honestly, William, I'm just jumping into this. I feel like I'm being obedient to something the Lord's asking me to do, but I don't know that I have it all figured out yet. This is the irony of all this. Okay, so everything I've ever done, I've relead. And so now I'm starting ReLeader, and I'm having to-

William Vanderbloemen:

From scratch.

Jon Chasteen:

So I'm like I don't know how to do this. I need you to mentor-

William Vanderbloemen:

That's awesome.

Jon Chasteen:

Me on how to start things.

William Vanderbloemen:

That's awesome. That's awesome. Well, I did the same thing. Coming out of a Presbyterian Church, everything I went into was somebody else's... And not just somebody else that was the founding pastor, but when I went to the first church in Houston, it was the oldest church in the city, and they hired the youngest senior pastor in the city. They were so dumb. They should've used a search prompt [inaudible]. But it's a completely different ballgame.

Jon Chasteen:

Totally different.

William Vanderbloemen:

I think it requires a completely different spiritual gift mix, frankly.

Jon Chasteen:

I agree.

William Vanderbloemen:

I think, as smart and godly and wise as our friend Craig Groeschel is, if he walked into a church like that, I don't know how well he would do. He's wired differently. And that's not a good or bad statement. It's just it's a different deal. So what are some of the marks that you've noticed that great people fixing broken stuff, what are some of the markers that they have? What are some of the lessons they've learned? And then I'll take it one more step after that, but what are some of those key markers you see?

Jon Chasteen:

Yeah, this will be fun for us to kind of dive into this, because I would love to hear what you have to say too. Some of the things that I've noticed between, say like an entrepreneurial leader versus someone that's more of a releader, while I'm a very fast-paced, quick-move leader, when I'm stepping into a season of releading, what I realize first and foremost is the number one thing I have to gain is trust. And I think the temptation... Most entrepreneurial leaders are very fast-paced, make decisions, move fast, we got to do it now, we got to do it now. And when you come into a releader situation, there's blood in the water. People have been wounded. People have been hurt. People have had their feelings hurt. People have been fired. There's all kinds of wounds there. And so there's a real pastoral heart to that, but there's also a real patience. What I've noticed, releaders have a lot of patience. This is a marathon. It's not a sprint. And the biggest challenge for me, one of the biggest gift sets that a releader has is the ability to see what needs to be done, but the patience to do it well.

William Vanderbloemen:

Say that again. That's a tweetable right there. Say that again.

Jon Chasteen:

It's any leader worth their salt can see what the problem is. I mean, that's the easy part. Seeing the problem is the easy part. The how do I fix it is what separates great releaders from not great releaders, because to do something quickly... And the analogy I use is, let's say you become the new captain of a cruise ship, right? There's 4,000 souls on board, and you're the new captain, and you get to the helm. You look at the compass. You look at the trajectory, and you realize this ship is heading in the wrong direction. We were supposed to be going to Cancun, and we're heading to Europe. We're going the wrong direction. Well, you see the problem, but if you take the wheel and spin it right as hard as you possibly can, you're going to throw people off the ship. People are going to get sick. All the furniture's going to get thrown off the ship.

William Vanderbloemen:

Yep, totally.

Jon Chasteen:

If you've ever been on a cruise, you don't even know the captain's turning. You don't even realize the boat is turning because the captain is doing it in a way that is healthy for everyone on board. He's going to get you to the right destination's-

William Vanderbloemen:

That's good.

Jon Chasteen:

But he or she is not going to do it in a way that makes everybody on the ship sick.

William Vanderbloemen:

So good. So good.

Jon Chasteen:

So to me, that's one of the big distinctions between a really strong leader and a really strong releader, is that the ability to have a loaded gun that you can't fire yet, you got to know the right time to fire it, the right time to do it, and there's a lot of strategy involved there.

William Vanderbloemen:

I wish I'd have heard that at 31 right before I started at First Pres Houston. So give you some context that you may not know and listeners may not, before First Pres Houston, I was an associate pastor right out of seminary, started my doctoral work, started earlier than I was supposed to and got recruited by Reformed Seminary to come in and start the program. And the only class that was available was church revitalization by a young pastor at the time named Harry Reeder. Harry ended up leading the largest church in the PCA Briarwood, in fact, died in a car wreck just earlier this year. [inaudible] Great, great man of God. I didn't want to go to the class though. I was so uninterested in it, and I took other things to do. But then God grabbed my heart and said, wow, look what can happen if you can revitalize? And he used in Revelation, which church was it that had lost their first love? It was the Ephesus, maybe that-

Jon Chasteen:

Was it Ephesus or Laodicea, one of those? I can't remember.

William Vanderbloemen:

One of the ones that's not there anymore.

Jon Chasteen:

I should know that.

William Vanderbloemen:

Anyway-

Jon Chasteen:

I'm a current lead pastor. I should know that.

William Vanderbloemen:

Yes, yes. Anyway, I end up going to this. So I start praying, "Lord, send me to a church that needs to be turned around." I'm more careful how I pray now.

Jon Chasteen:

A dangerous prayer.

William Vanderbloemen:

Man, it was a great church, but they were so upside down, and it was a very different situation than First Pres Houston because they'd gone through two splits in the last six years.

Jon Chasteen:

Wow.

William Vanderbloemen:

They'd sold their building with no idea where they were going to move. They were homeless. And I walk in, and they knew it was really bad. And because they knew how dire their situation was, I could get away with some speed that I couldn't get away with at First Pres Houston. I'd make decisions fast. And I remember one elder called me one time. He was so mad. And it was on into the evening, and I think he had, let's say he'd loosened up a little bit for the evening. And he called me about some decision I'd made, and he said, "You know what makes me so damn mad?" I said, "No, Stuart. What's that?" And he said, "If we fire you, we're done."

Jon Chasteen:

Liquid will do that to you.

William Vanderbloemen:

That's right. So anyway, that's a whole different situation. If you're really going into dire straits, you can get... If people know there's urgency, and that's that-

Jon Chasteen:

Well, and to know there's some things you can move fast on and some things you can't. So for example, when I became the lead pastor of Victory Church, there was a starvation for vision. They were starving for vision. So I became the lead pastor in November, February of 2014. By February of '15, I changed the vision of the church. I changed the core values. I changed the vision. That's quick. That's a fast shift to change.

William Vanderbloemen:

That is fast.

Jon Chasteen:

But then there's other areas that I had to go really, really slow, with certain staff, with certain cultural things.

William Vanderbloemen:

Sure.

Jon Chasteen:

So part of that is knowing what areas need to move fast and what areas do I need, okay, this is a marathon. And I tell you-

William Vanderbloemen:

Well, I-

Jon Chasteen:

Go ahead.

William Vanderbloemen:

Well, just going into that, John Kotter wrote a book called Leading Change. He actually was going to let me use it for my dissertation Leading Change in the Established Church. And his first rule of the seven or eight steps to leading change is create urgency. So when I was in Montgomery in this church that'd been through such a hard time, they knew the urgency was there. When I walked into First Pres Houston, I followed a very successful guy. He went to the only other church that was bigger than us in our denomination, a fabulous guy, I mean, really one of the legends. And if you follow success-

Jon Chasteen:

Yep, it's hard.

William Vanderbloemen:

You really better be able to discern... Was it the sons of Issachar that could discern the times?

Jon Chasteen:

Yes. Yeah, and that's a whole nother realm of ReLeader. So my book is going to be called How to Fix What You Didn't Break. There's a whole nother realm of leader, How Do I Follow a Successor That Was a Hero? And that's-

William Vanderbloemen:

[inaudible]. Well, one mistake I made... I think I probably made more mistakes than I realize, but I was 31, so I knew everything. So one thing, you hit on it, and I want leaders to hear this, because you said it, and it reminded me of my big error. I was trying to do so many new good things and going too fast, and what I didn't realize was people who are used to being in an established environment who maybe have some trauma, see someone moving fast as someone they cannot trust.

Jon Chasteen:

Yes, and someone that doesn't care about their needs or their feelings. Yeah.

William Vanderbloemen:

Why is he talking so fast? He must be hiding something. I'm getting taken for a ride. And I didn't realize speed can erode trust.

Jon Chasteen:

Yes.

William Vanderbloemen:

And I learned that the hard way. And if there's one-

Jon Chasteen:

I think trust is the most important thing, not just for releaders, but leaders. But when you come in as the releader, a lot of times trust has been broken. So a trust has either been broken, or your predecessor, they trusted him, but they don't trust you.

William Vanderbloemen:

That's right.

Jon Chasteen:

So either way, that's one of the very first things. One of the articles I wrote on the releader.co is all about this. The very number one thing you have to establish, no matter how long it takes, is trust. It's trust. So the very first day I took the stage at Victory Church to be the lead pastor, I was young and dumb. I don't know that I did this strategically, but it just came out of me, and I'm glad I said it. I said, "You don't know me. You don't trust me. What I'm asking you to do is credit me trust in the same way that God credited Abraham righteousness. He hadn't earned righteousness. He had did nothing to earn it. God credited it to him. And so I'm asking you if you will credit me trust and-

William Vanderbloemen:

That's good.

Jon Chasteen:

"Let me pay it back to you over the course of the next five years," because trust is the number one thing, number one.

William Vanderbloemen:

And you know what I've found helped build trust... I want to hear more, but this is such an important thing. And of course, trust takes forever to build and just a minute to lose. But one of the best lessons I got while I was at Princeton in seminary was one of the practical theology classes, the pastor was saying what to do in your first year. He said, "Most of y'all are going to established churches. They've been around a while, and you [inaudible] young." And I think when you don't have enough to do yet... You get to a new job, you don't know what to do right away, everybody's had that first couple weeks like now what do I do?... to take that time and go read every set of board minutes all the way back to day one of the church. And I didn't quite understand what he was saying, but what I've come to find is the people who walk into established places and do well are the people who become the preeminent historian on the church they're serving.

And I think you can find some pretty cool things, like First Presbyterian Hendersonville, where I was an associate pastor, I'm reading their board minutes, they moved their church. It was in the dead center of town, and they moved it to the outskirts of town, which is now the dead center of town. And that meant moving the cemetery. I mean, this was a big deal.

Jon Chasteen:

Wow.

William Vanderbloemen:

So, well, why did they do that? Okay, so this is Western North Carolina. This is 1830s. This is Trail of Tears. This is not good relations between the invading White men, or whatever you want to say, and the people who were here from the beginning. And they said in the board minutes, "We voted. The motion was made to move the church outside the town limits to be..." Now, these are their words, so don't go knocking me... "to be closer to the savages-

Jon Chasteen:

Wow.

William Vanderbloemen:

"To try and help spread the hope of the gospel among them."

Jon Chasteen:

Wow.

William Vanderbloemen:

They literally risked their lives-

Jon Chasteen:

Wow.

William Vanderbloemen:

To try and spread the gospel. Man, you preach that. That's what our church started doing.

Jon Chasteen:

Wow.

William Vanderbloemen:

Yes, we can add one more service. It's not going to kill us.

Jon Chasteen:

That's incredible.

William Vanderbloemen:

No one that I met ever started a church with the vision of saying let's start a ho-hum group of people that never want to change. These are really boring and stagnant... Usually there's a white hawk vision. And if, I think, leaders who do really well go figure out what that white hawk vision was and start talking to the oldest people in the congregation about it and just become that historian, I think it builds trust and leverages the ability to make some change. But-

Jon Chasteen:

Yeah, there's this-

William Vanderbloemen:

It's supposed to be your Q&A. Sorry.

Jon Chasteen:

No, no, no. It's so good. I want it to be a conversation. You're a releader. So I think the temptation of every releader when you come in is, one, all eyes are on you. So everyone's looking to you to fix whatever's broken. And you feel this pressure to get moving quickly. And one of the chapters in the book that'll release later on is the idea to, before you move, stop and remember, which [inaudible] is exactly what you're saying. I come in. I'm the new guy. For three to six months, I just need to be a sponge. I need to learn the context of what got us to this point, good and bad.

And really, this book is a formation from something that I feel like the Lord showed me on how to be a releader that's right in scripture, that I just pulled out of the scripture, is when they came back to rebuild the temple. God called Zerubbabel and Jeshua to come back and rebuild what they did not break. And then Nehemiah came back and rebuilt the wall to pick up the rubble of what was and put it back in place. And there's this passage... That story's all through Ezra and Haggai and Zecharia-

William Vanderbloemen:

Sure.

Jon Chasteen:

And I can't remember which book it is, but there's one part where the Lord says, "Who remembers the former glory of this house?" So there's this idea, let's stop and remember the goodness of what was. We know that King Nebuchadnezzar came and tore it all down. Something devastating happened, but let's pause to remember how great it was. And I don't care how horrific your department or your business that you've taken over or the church you've taken over, I don't care how much rubble is piled up, if you will go back far enough, there is something really beautiful-

William Vanderbloemen:

That's right.

Jon Chasteen:

About the organization, and there is something that God birthed in someone's heart to build that. And we go back to that because as releaders, and this is important, we don't get the right to redefine the why. And here's what I mean by that. So when they rebuilt the temple... Okay, it's been destroyed. It's all gone... the first thing they built was the altar. The very first thing they built was the altar. So before there was even a building to put it in, they built the altar, and everything was built around that. So that's the why. That's the why. Releaders have to discover what's our why.

William Vanderbloemen:

That's good.

Jon Chasteen:

What was the first vision that God gave the founder of this organization? And it says that they went on to build the foundation. They did. They built the foundation, but this real thing that a lot of people miss is the Bible says they put the altar on its foundation, and then they built the foundation, which is weird, but what what it is is it's the rock. If you've ever been to Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock, the gold dome, the rock that's under there, that's the rock where David built an altar. It's the place where Abraham raised his hand to strike his son. It is the original rock, the place where the altar in the first temple was built. And what I'm trying to say is God was telling them, there's some things you have to rebuild. There are some things that were already there, and you don't get to change the foundation that the altar sits on.

William Vanderbloemen:

Yep, that's good.

Jon Chasteen:

That's Jesus. That's whatever that was in your organization. And so our job as releaders is to do the hard work of remembering, going back, which is exactly what you did. Why was this place here? Let's learn something before we go off running in a direction that we don't know. So it's such an important part of releading, is to know I'm here to steward something. I'm not here forever. I'm the pastor of Victory Church, but really I'm not the lead pastor. I'm the interim lead pastor, because somebody's going to come after me, whether it's five years from now or 100 years from now. So it's my job to steward it for a season.

William Vanderbloemen:

That's right. That's right. Every pastor's an interim pastor.

Jon Chasteen:

Yep. Exactly right.

William Vanderbloemen:

That's good. Well, so there are going to be coaching circles. There's going to be content. There's going to be a book. And as this thing grows and sprouts, how can people keep up with ReLeader as it starts from scratch?

Jon Chasteen:

Yeah. No, yeah, first, all you listeners, pray for me. I'm trying to figure out how to start something. But no, the easiest way is to get on releader.co. It's R-E-L-E-A-D-E-R, just releader.co. There. You'll find the main page there, and all the communication will come through there. You can follow me on Instagram if you want, Jon Chasteen, no H in John. And just come along for the ride. If you're a releader, which by the way, chances are you are... Most of us are releaders. Most of us are releaders. So you don't have to be a pastor. This content is going to be very broad for businessmen and women, whether it's a department or whatever the case may be. So just go on the journey with us. You're a part of a tribe called the ReLeader Tribe, and we're going to learn from each other. So if you're interested in that, just go to releader.co and subscribe and join the journey.

William Vanderbloemen:

That's awesome. Well, Jon, thanks for taking time. I'm glad for your time at The King's University, but I'm also glad that God's released you from that now to be able to open a whole new door. I think you're going to help a lot of people. And thanks to you all for tuning in this week. Please do keep up with Jon. We'll send you all the show notes with domain names and that sort of thing. If you don't get those show notes, go to vandercast.com. And we won't hit you with a bunch of emails. We'll just send you the show notes and let you know what's coming down the pike. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for joining me during the summer while I'm away. And hope to have you on the show again soon, Jon, and hope that everyone listening will tune back in next week.

Jon Chasteen:

That'd be great. Thanks, sir.

William Vanderbloemen:

All right. That'll be good.

Jon Chasteen:

Awesome.

William Vanderbloemen:

That'll be good.

Jon Chasteen:

Thanks for having me on, man. I appreciate it.

Ivette Naron:

Thanks for listening...