In this episode of the Pivot podcast, co-hosts Dee Stokes and Dwight Zscheile are joined by special guest Jorge Acevedo. 

In August of 2023, Pastor Jorge retired as the Lead Pastor of Grace Church, a multi-site congregation in Southwest Florida. Pastor Jorge is a graduate of Asbury College, Asbury Theological Seminary, and most recently, he graduated with a Doctor of Ministry degree from United Theological Seminary. His doctoral project was entitled “Congregational Vitality: The Church’s Journey from Heroic Solo Leadership to Generative Team Leadership.”

Tune in as we dive into why exhaustion and overwhelm are so common among church leaders today with a few practical next steps that you can take to find a more sustainable way forward for you and your faith community.

Stay tuned for more episodes unraveling the complexities of this cultural shift.

You're in the right place if you're a pastor, lay leader, or simply curious about how faith communities adapt in changing times. Let's embark on this journey together!

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Dee Stokes: If you find yourself being more exhausted, overwhelmed, and burned out as a church leader than you ever imagine you'd be. You're not alone. And you are in the right place today. Because in this episode, we will dive into why exhaustion and overwhelm is so common amongst church leaders today, and what some practical steps are that you can take to find a more sustainable way forward for you and your faith community. Hello again everyone. I am Dr. Dee Stokes. Welcome to the Pivot Podcast. This is a podcast where we talk about how the church can faithfully navigate a changing world. I am so pleased today and excited that we have Pastor Jorge Acevedo with us. In August of 2023 Pastor Jorge retired as the lead pastor of Grace church, a multi-site congregation in Southwest Florida. Pastor Jorge is a graduate of Asbury College, Asbury Theological Seminary, and most recently he graduated with a Doctor of Ministry degree from United Theological Seminary. His doctoral project was entitled "Congregational Vitality: The Church's Journey from Heroic Solo Leadership to Generative Team Leadership". He has been married to his wife, Sheryl for 41 years. Welcome back to the Pivot podcast pastor, Dr. Jorge Acevedo. Let's talk about, welcome back. How are you?

Jorge Acevedo: I'm well, I'm very, very well.

Dee Stokes: Good, good. Well, let's talk about exhaustion amongst pastors and leaders and the one person solo pastor model many churches get involved in. But first, tell us a little bit more about you and your history. Share with our audience something that we cannot read about in your bio and what you're doing now as you are retired. Don't believe it?

Jorge Acevedo: Not at all. Yeah, well, what's what's written between the lines of my bio would be that I'm a first generation follower of Jesus, and I did not come to Christ, you know, through summer camp or Vacation Bible school or walking the aisle after some, you know, fiery evangelistic message. I came to Christ kind of through the side door, through a pair of church ministry, Campus Crusade for Christ on my high school campus and gave my life to Jesus after a series of invites to first a community center where students were gathering, where they'd play secular songs from the 70s, and then somebody would get up and do some group games and a little talk where somewhere in there would be a little Bible verse, and then they'd say, come back next week. And I came back because there was good food and beautiful girls and, and then asked me to be in a small group with a group of guys where we were studying what looks a lot like Alpha, you know, who is Jesus? Who's the Holy Spirit? What's the Bible all about? And it was in one of those small groups and my senior year of high school that I did what Sam Shoemaker said any human can do, I gave as much of myself as I could to as much of God as I understood. And I stepped over the line of faith and that night became a follower of Jesus. But because I was a pure pagan, I mean, I knew nothing. I didn't have the decoder ring, had no frame of reference of the Christian faith. I went out and smoked a joint to celebrate the fact that I had become a Christian.

Dee Stokes: All right, all right.

Jorge Acevedo: And that made sense, Dee. That just made sense to me. As a 17 year old, landed in a United Methodist Church going through charismatic renewal in the 70s, and it was out of that church that I was called and sent and and I've been serving the Lord now for 40 plus years and just grateful for the privilege of serving the Lord. And I would say that my 39 years as a pastor, I spent most of my focus on how to reach people who were just like me, who had no frame of reference to the church, for the church. And so I've tried to be the kind of leader that's led churches, the byline of our churches is "we're the church for the people nobody else wants or sees," for people on the margins and trying to figure out what that looks like. And then I was privileged to do that for 27 years in one space. And so that was a lot of fun, too.

Dee Stokes: Awesome. Well, tell us what you're doing now because, you know, there's no retirement in God. I mean, you can retire from the grind, but but what are you doing in your retirement season? Sure.

Jorge Acevedo: So I'm only 63.75 or so right now. I thought I would finish my run in ministry as the lead pastor at Grace church somewhere into my. 30 years, 34 to 35. You know, somewhere in my late 70s, I'd hang up my preaching sneakers and and it just didn't, or mid early 70s, I'd hang up my preaching sneakers, but it didn't work out that way. I was in London, England, at Holy Trinity Brompton, and a pastor who I've choosed that are older than him. I think he was 20 something, spoke three prophetic words over my life, and it launched me into a journey where over the last four years, I stepped away from my leadership at Grace Church this past August, the end of August, and handed the baton of leadership to one of my spiritual sons who was in my youth group, when I was in seminary, at 14. And he's now the lead pastor of Grace church and doing a remarkable job. And the prophetic words that were spoken over me were that I would I would see a harvest of next generation leaders like I'd never known before. And I had been sensing the spirit was writing in my soul a desire to spend more and more of my time it was what I was doing at the church, as a matter of fact, with younger and newer leaders and investing in them and living into Paul's word in 2 Timothy 2:2 , the things that you've heard and seen in me, these entrust to faithful men and women, who will in turn be entrust it to faithful men and women. One of my most beautiful pictures at the church that I just left is of five generations of Pauls and Timothys, or Pauls and Timothynas, that that are a part of a stream of, of vocational ministry, much less the folks sitting in the chairs where I believe the church exists to be a place where we're disciples who make disciples. And that's not just a professional thing. That's the full body of Christ or the whole body of Christ. So I've formed a little LLC, and I spend most of my days on zoom meetings, coaching younger and newer pastors. And I use the phrase younger. Sometimes they are younger in age, sometimes they're newer, sometimes they're closer to you and me in age. And they and they're just new to this assignment. And so they want some coaching. And so I typically spend an hour and a half to two hours per session coaching with pastors, working with them on their walk with God and on their work for God. It's pretty much that simple. We walk, talk about their abiding in Christ and their abounding in the work of the Lord, their faithfulness to God and their fruitfulness for God. And we use some instruments to have some oversight and accountability so that there is a track record of growth in their life. And, and so I spend my days doing that. And as well as writing some books and every once in a while I, I put, I strap on the preaching gear and head off to a church or a conference and speak a little bit, but I'm absolutely loving it. I'm absolutely finding the same kind of delight I found as a local church pastor. I'm finding in this new role, the Lord gave me a word in the beginning of this journey. He said, Jorge, you're transitioning from being a spiritual leader to a spiritual sage. You're transitioning from from being a pastor to a poppy. I find that a role that I have here in my mid 60s is that I'm a bit of a spiritual father to women and men, and so I'm leaning into that. One of my mentors, my book, Richard Rohr, says that if you listen to your soul, you spend the first half of your life building a cup and filling it and the second half of your life emptying it out.

Dee Stokes: Yes.

Jorge Acevedo: My observation is that for a lot of spiritual leaders, they never stop building and filling the cup. It's interesting that in the book of Leviticus, you could serve in the inner court until from 25 to 50, and then after 50 under serve in the outer court. There's something about that movement. It's a movement of diminishing that God invites us into. And I'm trying to live into that. I'm trying to live into the pouring out of my life. Having a blast.

Dee Stokes: I love it. I saw something the other day that talked about the life quarters that we live in, where we go from our youth, and, and one of those is mentorship, right? And then legacy. We want to leave a legacy. But mentorship is key. And it's a key biblical principle that I think we've lost a lot in the church. So I love the fact that you do that. I mentor too and I love it. It's probably the most fulfilling thing I've probably ever done, and I'm sure you feel the same way. So at the end of this episode, we're going to make sure everybody knows how to get in touch with you, because I'm sure some of our listeners are going to want to to tap into your wisdom and your experience. So. I really appreciate that. Let's talk a little bit about exhaustion. What have you seen maybe even with some of the folks you're mentoring, but just in general in the body of Christ with pastors and leaders? We're tired, Pastor Jorge. We're tired. Talk about it.

Jorge Acevedo: Yeah. I mean, I think we were we were tired 4 or 5 years ago. And then the context of the world and the nation, for those of us that are on this podcast from the US, just escalated with disease and division and disaster and disorientation. Those are my D words. That's been the season we've walked through in a politically divisive, denominationally, divisive, culturally divisive world where a global pandemic overnight shifted all of our strategies on what it means to join Jesus in his mission in this world. It has left leaders just exhausted, and my hunch is that we were already at, as a lot, I'm talking about the Church of Jesus, and maybe particularly spiritual leaders, as a lot we were already at the brink, and I think the last 4 or 5 years has just pushed us over the brink. I don't believe that where we were pre George Floyd and the election divisions and the denominational divisions and Covid, I don't think it was sustainable then either. This just, just turned up. It just threw fuel on the fire. And so my observation and my conversation with leaders is that they are exhausted. But I think we were exhausted before this. I don't think we can simply blame the most recent years of Covid and all the rest. So, um, and I believe in great part, it is what our Surgeon General has been talking about. It's the epidemic of loneliness.

Dee Stokes: Yes

Jorge Acevedo: among leaders there is a, as I wrote in my dissertation, there is a path, particularly for those of us that are vocational pastors and ministers, there's a path that we travel down. And that path, the model that was given to us on that path was a model of heroic solo leadership. It, we were said we were told to look at certain leaders in certain churches and say, we need to be like this and we need to function like this. And then, as we have found over the last decade, many of those places were built on sand, not on rock. And they were built around the heroics of a solo leader who often, not always, but often had huge character defects as they set up their own kingdoms and and got exposed. And so, you know, the exhaustion, I think, in many ways is birthed out of bad training. But we learned the tools that we were given, that we put in our tool pouch, whether it was in Bible college or seminary or some bi-vocational training or however it was that we that we came to the spot where we were leading in some kind of spiritual endeavor, a group of people, the tool pouch that we were given was not sufficient for the context that we were living in. And I think we go forward by going back. And that may be more than what you want to talk about right now. But I do think we go forward by going back. We have to reclaim. My observation is that the Spirit of God is drawing the body of Christ back into the ancient paths that, as Jeremiah said, we need to find the ancient paths and walk down them, and we will be, find refreshment for our soul. And it is the ancient path of the ancient ways, the rules of life, the spiritual disciplines, living richly and deeply in authentic community. Those are the tools for the exhaustion that we're feeling. Now our memory muscle, our muscle memory is all about heroic solo leadership. It is, you know, and we came by it honestly. We came by it honestly. We were told, do these things and your church will be fruitful and you'll be fruitful. And in the end, we found out it tasted like sawdust. Just wasn't no nourishment.

Dee Stokes: Hey, we got to stay right there because you're saying something that is important, I think, to our audience. Getting back, I grew up in an old Baptist church, Black Baptist church. We'd call it the old landmark. Let's go back to it. That's a song. And let's go back to the old landmark we study war no more. That's it. And I preached a message called, let's go back to the old landmark one time. So let's talk about that, because I think we have focused so much on vocation and how to run a church. We know how to do church, and sometimes we've lost our way in our first mission. Our first responsibility is to God that we are to worship God. I was talking to a friend of mine on the golf course of all places one time who had retired. He was a United Methodist pastor for 40 years, and he's crying on the golf course saying how he served the church, but he did not serve God. And that is an epidemic, if you will, of epic proportions. If we are serving the church or serving even the people, but we've lost our way with God, we've stopped spending time. You're talking about spiritual disciplines, now I'm Wesleyan and you're Wesleyan. And so we call them means of grace.

Jorge Acevedo: Yes, ma'am.

Dee Stokes: And we've got to get back to those means of grace. So come on, tell us how to do that.

Jorge Acevedo: Yeah. I mean, it's interesting that we find ourselves rooted to a beautiful Hebrew tradition that every day they pray the Shema: "Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength." You know. And so we know that that's the taproot of our faith that we have to we have to practice the way of Jesus. If we want to be like Jesus, we got to do what Jesus did. And one of Jesus' favorite place was the wilderness. Our good friend John Mark Comer has written that beautiful book, "The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry" and does a beautiful little dive into the idea, concept that Jesus went to the wilderness, the eremos place. And we tend to think of the wilderness as the place where Jesus went to the devil, and thus the wilderness equals a bad place, a place of temptation. But every time you see the word eremos, it's where Jesus went to be with his father. And it's interesting that in each h of the narratives that describes Jesus going into the wilderness, it says he was led by the spirit into the wilderness. So the spirit led Jesus into a place where he could be with God, simply to be with God. The epidemic of loneliness is equaled maybe only by the epidemic of spiritual emptiness. As your friend on the golf course so beautifully and sadly illustrated, a person can give themselves to vocational ministry for an entire career, 40, 50 years and realize that they served maybe the institution, or maybe they had a higher ecclesiology and they served the big C Church. But were they serving our amazing God who is Father, son, and Holy Spirit revealed to us in Jesus? And are they serving God? Are so when I started ministry D and my hunch is that you, you went through a similar journey. I would read 4 or 5 leadership books for every book on spiritual formation. As the decades have gone by, I now read ten books on spiritual formation to every book I read on leadership. Right? I'm not saying leadership doesn't matter, but it matters nothing if my soul is empty. I f the work that I'm doing for God is destroying the work of God in me, then my life is out of order. I'm not living the shalom life, the integrated life that God wants me to live. And so it is found in these ancient paths, these old landmarks, these means of grace, these spiritual disciplines, because they're the very things that Jesus did. If we want to have the life that Jesus had, then we need to live the life that Jesus did. And the life that Jesus did was a life that was described in the gospel narratives as, ironically, a life of hiddenness until he was 30. It was a life of hiddenness, of obscurity, of being in the synagogue and likely working as a stonemason with his father. And then when his father died of tending to his mother and his brothers and sisters and, and then at 30, you know, stepping into this role as a rabbi and is and it's interesting what Jesus did not do. What he didn't do was get skinny jeans and the elevation band and go on the road with a tent. Because that's what I would have done, you know, skinny jeans, elevation band, a tent, gone on the road. But instead Jesus gathers a group of adolescent men, and then we sometimes forget that that larger group or circle, there were some women in that circle around Jesus. And he spent 20,000 plus hours with them. He built a team. In my dissertation, I call it a generative team. A team capable of multiplying, of getting out of control. And so Jesus had the audacity to say to those group of adolescent boys and the listeners on the periphery, he had the audacity to say to them, is better for you that I go, and if I'm in the room, Dee, I'm raising my hand, going, like, Jesus, can we talk about this you leaving stuff? We kind of like you staying. You heal, you anger the religious bigots, you take on the bullies, you deliver folks, we like what you do Jesus. It isn't better for you to go. It's better for you to stay. And he says, well, let me finish, because if I leave, I'll send the Holy Spirit. What's better than one Jesus? How about 12 or 44 or 120 or 3000 little Christs filled with the Holy Spirit, doing the things that Jesus did out into the world? It's better for you that I go, he said, yes, it's better for you that I go. So the so the plan of Jesus was not simply. The healing of the planet through the giving of his life, sacrificially on the cross for the brokenness of humanity and bringing the kingdom now and to come. But it was also the establishing of a spirit filled people who collaboratively together, who don't have all the gifts, but who work together as a team and do the work of Jesus in a way that is a blessing to the world and to those who give it. And it took me later into my ministry to learn that I was doing a fairly decent job at blessing the world, but I was losing in the transaction. And and so about 20 years ago, I began to intentionally make a shift in how I do ministry and how I build ministry. And my world got smaller in terms of immediate influence and our impact got broader and deeper, deeper and wider, and we didn't perfect it by any means. But I'm convinced that living in community, where there's accountability, where somebody's looking over your shoulder, where in our tradition we call it watching out for one another in love, that living in community is the secret to overcoming the isolation and the exhaustion that so many of us feel.

Dee Stokes: Before we get to the secret sauce. Now let's go back a little bit and talk about the start of your ministry, what ministry model you used, and then the transition into this newer model. Share with our audience that.

Jorge Acevedo: Yeah, I've said that I've had three conversions, one in the late 70s to Jesus. Second, in the early 90s as I fell in love with the body and bride of Christ, my ecclesiology got saved, if you will, and then, and then and then about 17, 18 years ago, I had a third conversion from heroic solo leader to generative team leader. The early part of my ministry, I was trained to do ministry, some would call it attractional ministry, some would call it seeker ministry. You can give it any title you want, but it was kind of, you know, I call it small e evangelical ministry. It was, you know, good preaching, good youth ministry, good kids ministry, very, very strategy oriented, very much about do this and you'll get this result. Do this and you'll get this result. And the, the what I discovered the underbelly of again, what we might call attractional ministry. The underbelly of it is that what you do to attract them? You got to do more to keep them.

Dee Stokes: That's a word

Jorge Acevedo: So if you got a monkey this week, next week, you better bring an orangutan, you know? And the truth is, you know, I live three hours from Disney World. The truth is, you know, no matter how many smokes and lights and hazers and tasers and all the rest that we bring in, we just can't do it as good as Disney World. And that's not what the human heart hungers for. They hunger for authenticity and generosity and vulnerability. Now, again, I want to I want to say this, Dee. I did it with great intention, with, I think, with as pure heart as I could. And we saw a lot of people come to faith in Jesus. There was about 4 or 5 years where the church that I led was the fastest growing church in our denomination, and so we grew from 300 to 2000, you know, in a matter of 5 or 6 years. But we were a mile wide and an inch deep, and I was ready to walk away. I was ready to walk away from this ministry that I loved and this community that I loved, because it was just unsustainable. And so 17 years ago, I had my ministry crisis moment where at year ten, my Timothy, who's now the lead pastor of Grace Church, came to be on our staff as one of our pastors. And he shared with me a new way of doing ministry, of building teams that have the capacity to address what Marty Lenski and Ron Heifetz call adaptive challenges. Yes, we're pretty good at tasks, we're pretty good at legislative stuff, but we're not good at building teams that have the capacity to address adaptive challenges. Adaptive challenges are defined as those challenges in our context, where we do not have the information at hand to address them. So let me give you an example: in March of what 20 2020, we get this thing that comes through and overnight we have to go online for all of our ministry. So how do you disciple? How do you set up a zoom Bible study? Well, that's a task. You can just go online, Google it, and you can set up a zoom meeting and have Bible study online. That's. How do you disciple people online? I have no idea.

Dee Stokes: Right.

Jorge Acevedo: But if you get enough smart people in the room on a whiteboard where trust is high and you can resist what Patrick Lencioni calls the Five Dysfunctions of a Team. So you want to be a functional team where there's trust, not lack of trust, where there's noisy meetings, not artificial harmony. All of those things that Lencioni only talks about. If you can build a team, they can get in that room and if they pray hard and work hard and experiment, they can figure out not how to have a zoom meeting, but how to make more and maturing disciples of Jesus online. That's an adaptive challenge. Setting up a website is a task. How to disciple people on the website: adaptive challenge. And in our complicated, ever changing world, we have to have those kinds of teams that can address those kinds of challenges because they're coming at rapid fire to us today. So even this week, I have pastors that I'm coaching. I'm coaching about 20 or so plus pastors, pastors that are asking one another in our little our little electronic communities that we've created, they're asking one another, how do we address the war in Israel from the pulpit? I don't know, that's an adaptive challenge. So here's the cool thing, because there's trust. Those little groups are online. They're doing experiments and they're, hey, I'm doing this. Well, I'm doing this. I'm showing this video. I'm reading this word. I'm, we're doing.. Great. They're helping each other get better with this challenge. And so I was not trained to do that. I was trained to preach really biblical, practical messages and offer programs that help people take their next step in their discipleship. Not a bad thing. Not a bad thing. But it doesn't take into fact that life is fluid, and it's filled with all kinds of challenges and crises and opportunities that get laid at our doorstep as a church and as leaders. And we don't have, no single person has all that it takes to address those challenges, because what would happen before, 17 years ago, is something would happen in the world. A tsunami would hit India. We have mission partners in India. It would land on my desk and they'd go, Jorge, what are we going to do? And I would say, um, my intuition says we take an offering. Great. And we take an offering. We raise $100,000 and everybody cheers. Exactly happened. We help build hospitals and rebuild cities and churches and all of that in India. But at the end of the day, we really didn't have the capacity to address that problem long term and help India actually rebuild itself. We raised a bunch of money. We helped with some immediate aid, but we didn't address the deeper issues of a community that was recovering from a tsunami. And that was repeated in my life over and over and over again. Hey, we need a new teacher at the preschool. Okay, well, how are we going to get a new teacher, I don't know. Well, Jorge, come give us the answer. And because I was a fairly intuitive leader, you know, maybe nine times out of ten, I was right. But when we messed up, it sometimes was really ugly. So it's that heroic solo leader was the way I was trained, I was modeled. Those were the examples that were lifted up. And what's happened over the last decade and a half plus has been I've been converted into being committed to building teams that are capable of addressing adaptive challenges.

Dee Stokes: You, I want to point out something that you said that I think is extremely important. You said when someone comes to you and askd you a question, which is an adaptive challenge, you'll say, "I don't know". We have to be released to say, I don't know. And congregants have to be okay with the pastor or leader saying, I don't know. What do you think about it? Let's sit in a room and talk about it. Let's get a team of people to talk about it. Let's talk to the pastor down the street, see if they're dealing with it. And and we have been socialized, I'll say ecclesiologically, to depend on the pastor to actually have all the answers. This is a mindset shift and potentially a theologically different response. Talk about that. How how when your mind shifted 17 years ago, did, and your theology shifted, I would say as well, kind of tell us about that.

Jorge Acevedo: Yeah. In the 90s, I realized that I had this bias towards the local church, kind of as a young, again, I call myself a small e evangelical. It's not often good to say that anymore, but I think you know what I mean. I want to be kind. I'm, you know, I love Jesus. I'm not mad about it. You know? And and because I kind of live in that theological space, I think I was, I never embraced the beauty of the body and bride of Christ. So I had a theological shift in the mid early 90s around that. And I realized, no, the body of Christ is the bride. Nobody throws tomatoes at the bride when she walks down the aisle. We cheer for the bride. And yet I found myself putting up with the bride so I could do ministry. I know that sounds odd, but that's the world I was living in. So in the 90s, I embraced the beauty of the body of Christ and the Bride of Christ. But it took me into, into to somewhere around 2006. So another 15 plus years it took me to get that lived out with the second conversion of what does it actually mean to embrace the priesthood of all believers in a practical way? I mean, as a Protestant, of course, I embrace the priesthood of all believers. Of course, I believe in the spiritual gifts. I preached on the spiritual gifts. I just did ministry like nobody else had any spiritual gifts. I mean, yeah, you could usher and sing in the choir. I mean, you know, the traditional stuff, right? But the idea of let's go to the Ephesians 4 text around the releasing of the APEST, the apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers, as I've heard Al Hirsch and others talk about APEST. They talk about how the church is typically run by Shepherd Teachers. The last S and the T and the shepherd teachers tend to either domesticate or run off the APEs, the apostles, prophets, and the evangelists. So over the last 17 years, what I've tried to do is not run off the APEs, but platform the APEs, give them space to venture into amazing ministry opportunities that are non-traditional that the shepherd teachers love. Shepherd teachers love everything to happen under the steeple. The APEs, the APEs want to be out at the parks. They want to be down in the on the other side of the tracks. They want to address racial reconciliation. They want to deal with justice issues. They want to. They want to. They want to figure, as one of the APEs in our church is trying to do right now. They want to figure out how we can minister to the women in the strip clubs. They, you know, they're out on the periphery of the church and they're standing out there saying to the body of Christ, hey, you know, come on in. The water's fine. There's good stuff happening. Jesus is at work in the world. We're just trying to join him where he's at work. And I don't know that my theology was robust enough for that, Dee. I think I had much more of a theology that said that God showed up when we showed up. And that it happened underneath the steeple. And yet, you know, when it comes to, for example, kids ministry, the average Christian kid in America spends less than one hour a week in church. And so if we're putting all of our eggs in the one hour a week of church basket, we're sunk. We're absolutely sunk. It's one of the reasons why I embraced so quickly the Fresh Expressions movement. When I went out to England and did a pilgrimage there and then have become dear friends with Chris Backert, Dr. Chris Backert and the good folks at Fresh Expressions us, I think they're pushing the church to say God is at work in every place. And what does it mean for us to release ordinary people, to join Jesus in his mission in the world, doing what they do every day in ballparks and in cafes, in pubs, in whatever space God has folks at. What does it mean for folks to to join Jesus in his mission there? And so the a gift of that shift in theology was I was gifting myself with the gift of not having to figure everything out myself.

Dee Stokes: Amen.

Jorge Acevedo: And freeing myself up for more time to join Jesus in the eremos place in the wilderness to build spiritual capacity and spiritual proximity to Jesus so that, so then I'm listening well to the Spirit of God because I still have to lead. You know, I'm not in any way, shape or form. I still believe in the Romans 12 gift of leadership. If you have the gift to lead and Paul says, lead, lead, we need women and men who can lead. I'm a leader. It's my spiritual gift and so I have to lean into that. But I don't lead by myself anymore. I lead with teams.

Dee Stokes: I want you to talk about a little bit how you got the congregation to shift, and then if you could just give us a rundown, a list of some different ways that you all did ministry. I know you have have had a great ministry with folks with special needs. So talk maybe just give us a rundown of that after you tell us how you how you convinced, coerced or whatever you had to do, the congregation. Yeah.

Jorge Acevedo: So about 17 years ago one of the things we did is we got very clear about our focus, our mission to make more and maturing disciples of Jesus, our vision to partner with God in transforming people from unbelievers to fully devoted disciples of Jesus. And we got clear about our core values, our fighting words. What? What is it that we evaluate everything that we do on? And there were three things. And these three things are important. And they're everywhere, all over our campuses. They we have them on the walls. We lovingly say we'd put them on the toilet paper if we could figure out a way to do that. And it's our three core values. We're unashamedly God centered: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. What matters is what God wants, not what we want. Number two, we're passionately people focused, especially people who are not yet a part of us. Okay. And then number three, we are strategically team based, unashamedly God centered, passionately people focused and strategically team based. And even just by simply saying that and putting it on posters and putting it on our website, it was simply saying that the leaders were saying we were going to be a team based church. So one of the things you'll often hear around Grace is when somebody comes up with a new idea is, okay, great, where's your team? Where's your team? Have you built a team? And we'll help you do that. We'll give you the tools to build a healthy team. And there's a whole bunch of tools that you have to do. I would say the first place we started, though, was not with some kind of proclamation or declaration that ran concurrently with the second thing that was happening, is we had to create one healthy team. Because what we had is a whole bunch of really high capacity task teams, teams that knew how to do tasks. But we didn't have teams that knew how to address adaptive challenges so that they could lead their areas with excellence, faithfulness to God, and fruitfulness for God. And so we built one healthy team, and that healthy team was my operational team. And then from there, in concentric circles, we went out to the campuses and they built healthy operational teams. And then within the ministries of those church, like a fractal does. Wayne Cordeiro at New Hope has taught us all about the fractaling. It's the web of the organic web of that you see behind a leaf when you see this, that goes from one to another to another. We're fractaling. And I would say 17 years in, we maybe are three layers deep in some of the campuses and some of the areas. It is slow, tedious work to build healthy teams. All you got to do is read the letters of the New Testament, and you realize that the building of teams to lead local missional outposts for the Kingdom called the church is busy, ugly, messy work. Just read Corinthians. Look at the problems that Paul had as he's talking to the saints, getting drunk during worship, sleeping with other people's spouses. You know, disorder, misuse of the spiritual gifts, suing one another. And that's in the church. That's in the church. That ain't the folk on the outside of Corinth that were doing the stuff at the pagan that's in the life of the church. So we need to demythologize our understanding of the church. It will always be messy, you know, it's worse than you think it is, you know? But given that context, we're still called to raise up teams that have that capacity. So we started with one. And over the last 17 years we've allowed what C.S. Lewis called Christianity the good infection, we've allowed the good infection of teams to grow. And what we're experiencing, you know, 17 years later, is that we're getting traction around these teams. The strongest team, I think, outside of the operational team, the hub team that leads the whole of Grace church, is our outreach team or what we call Reach Send Fresh Expressions team. Heather, a layperson in our church who was raised up, leads that team, all with lay people and those lay people give, I would argue, 30 to 40 hours a month to lead their ministry as volunteers. I mean, their life is built around how can we release the APEs in our congregation, in our community, to reach people on the periphery, to join Jesus in his mission in the world? And so it's, pragmatically, it's the hard work of building teams. Social scientists tell us it takes somewhere around eight hours a month to build the kind of trust to do adaptive work. And folks say, well, we don't have eight hours to give as a volunteer. Your choir gives more than eight hours a week, eight hours a month. I'm sorry I said a week. I meant a month. Yeah. Your choir gives eight hours a month. They rehearse for two hours a week. They show up an hour before church. They sing for the hour that they're there. They give 3 to 4 hours every week to sing an anthem. Not a bad thing. That's if that's their gifts. That's great. Now, how much better would it be for have that same choir have an operational team that said, how can we use music to reach people who are far from God outside of Sunday morning? What might that look like?

Dee Stokes: Hm.

Jorge Acevedo: Maybe we should open a music school for under served communities. And maybe our music ministry. Wouldn't it be cool if the choir at your local church led music ministry in an underserved community? I think they have the heart to do it. What they don't have is the capacity to do it. And it takes it takes creating a team that has the thought you know, we serve the God, Ephesians 3, who can do infinitely more than we can imagine or ask.

Dee Stokes: Yes.

Jorge Acevedo: So why don't we imagine and ask our infinite God, who can do anything, how we might serve an underserved community with music? That's an example. We're not doing that. That would be a great thing for a church to do. So, you know, I would say that one of the benefits of 17 years ago was that we were a vital church. I mean, we were growing and vital, even though I was having my own internal crisis, a crisis of identity, a crisis of practice, of ministry and all the rest, the church, for the most part, if anybody were to look at it, would go, it's vital. And in the previous ten years we had launched some pretty innovative ministries around recovery. We are in our, let's see, 23rd year of offering recovery services and small groups. And we've seen literally thousands of people come to Christ and get discipled and get well. And we continue to expand that ministry. We're in jails, we're in rehab centers, we're in detox centers. We're trying to help people. Our next iteration will be to figure out how to help people once they come out of rehab or prison, how to help folks garner the skills to be self sustaining and sober and Christ following. And that's a whole adaptive challenge that that recovery team is working on. I would think that I would say that one of the things we did very well in those first years and has continued, has been to have a passion for those who are not yet a part of us. And in the early days it was doing big fall festivals and we'd have thousands of people show up on our campus through servant evangelism kinds of events. In these days, we're venturing more into things like dinner church and messy church, which happen in parks, and they happen in community centers and trailer parks, those kinds of things. And then you mentioned our special needs ministry that I discovered this morning is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. And so for ten years we've been serving an underserved, unreached people group in our community. I would just say parenthetically, I think church leaders need to think like missionaries and not like domesticated church leaders. If you think like a domesticated church leader, you'll only serve your church. If you think like a missionary, you'll serve your community and your world. And so what we did is we began to think like missionaries and said, what's an unreached people group that's missiological language in our Lee County area and through our prayerful discernment, prayer walking, studying, asking questions, we discovered that about 600 students a year age out of the school system, State of Florida will educate a special needs adult until they're 20 or 21. I'm not sure the exact date after that. They're on their own. The poverty rate doubles or quadruples after that. The divorce rate doubles after that. And what you're typically left with is a single mom raising a 32 year old somewhere on the spectrum of disabilities, young adult, and their life is given to that. Of course, they live below the poverty line and they barely exist. And so we created a space we call it exceptional entrepreneurs, where we started creating little side businesses, little side hustles for them to come and create a community. They worship together, they pray together, they do devotions together every day, and then they work. We have a woodshop now where they create product that we that we sell to our congregation and our community. But what it really is, is it's a community. And some of the greatest joys in my life have been to baptize some of those special needs young adults into the life of our church. We've seen many of their families come to Christ. We offer a respite program. We're now part of the Tim Tebow Foundation, and we do the Night to Shine. We're engaged with a summer camp program with another partner that we do this. We're full all in on the special needs community, and it's become another one of our kind of calling cards. If you want to go to the church that cares about families, special needs. Then you want to go to Grace church.

Dee Stokes: I love it. I thank you so much. As we end this episode, I want you to give, if you will, one word of encouragement for a tired leader, whether they're a solo pastor or have many teams. What is that one word of encouragement today for them?

Jorge Acevedo: Order your life. Do what Dallas Willard said. The main thing you give your congregation is the person that you are becoming, and that is what they will see and that is who they will become. So arrange your life so that you are living every day in joy and contentment and confidence in God. So you arrange your life so whatever it takes, find your eremos space to be with God, to hear the Holy Spirit, to be astonished by His Word. As you read, as you pray. I practice what I call the five one, two, five things I'm grateful for. I write it out every day. I robustly write it out. One thing that's bothering me I want to defang the snake before it bites me. And number two, two things that make the day great. And I do my 512 every day. And then I read scripture and I journal. It's what keeps me in the vine, abiding in the vine. The second thing, the flip side of that coin is don't do it alone. Find a team. Build a team. Take responsibility for living richly and deeply in community. Remember Dallas's word. The greatest gift you give your congregation is the person that you are becoming. That's what they will see, and that's who they will become. And we don't want our people to become anxious, exhausted people. We want them to be filled with the Spirit of God joining Jesus in his mission, joyfully serving him with all the challenges and the opportunities that life brings.

Dee Stokes: Amen. Thank you for that. And thank you for joining us. Tell our people how they can get in touch with you. Sure, if they need you.

Jorge Acevedo: So I have a really simple website and it's there where I just described my coaching, my writing and my speaking ministry, and I'm available to do all of those. It's Jorge Acevedo, and my real name is Jorje, but not even my mother calls me that. So my Latino friends give me some grace. She called me "George" my entire life. It's JorgeAcevedo .com.

Dee Stokes: We thank you so much, Pastor Jorge, for joining us. And we thank everyone for tuning in. This is Dr. Dee signing off on another episode of the Pivot podcast. We will see you next week. God bless you.

Jorge Acevedo: The Pivot podcast is a production of Luther Seminary's Faith +Lead. Faith Lead is an ecosystem of theological resources and training designed to equip Christian disciples and leaders to follow God into a faithful future. Learn more at FaithLead .org.