Transcript
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I'm your host, pastor Plek, and joining me in studio none other than Eric Creekmore, who is the executive director of the Association of Hill Country Churches.
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Really, church planning network, love it, yeah.
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So, eric, thanks for being on.
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Yeah, dude, good to see you, man, good to be back.
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Yeah On the official Pastor Plek's podcast.
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Come on, dude.
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Good to see you, man, good to be back.
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Yeah, on the official Pastor Plex podcast.
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Come on dog Pastor Plex podcast after you were on, just took like a New York rise in downloads.
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You might want to, yeah.
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We went from dozens to scores.
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Lots, yeah, lots, but let's talk church planning and let's talk about what you do specifically in your role and how it shifted from your role as an executive pastor at Hill Country Bible Church, or is it still that?
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Yeah, it's multifaceted.
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What exactly is it you do around here?
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Great question, I wish I knew no.
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So back in June began the transition from what I was doing at Hill Country, austin, to take over leadership for our association, our network of churches in greater Austin.
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That is still arm and arm, trying to multiply churches to reduce lostness, saturate the city of the gospel.
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Back at Hill Country I'm technically the church planting director, so obviously we were laughing about Venn diagrams earlier in our conversation, our pre-recording conversation, and so obviously overlap there.
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But instead of working on helping to see one local church have that be just a regular part of their ministry, raising up, launching church planters is like okay, how do I help all the churches across our network to be effective in that regard?
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Like that's, at the end of the day, that's what my role is supposed to do right, healthy reproduction.
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So make sure that our churches, lead pastors, elder boards, are healthy, because we don't want to reproduce unhealth, obviously, but they're healthy, but reproducing Right, right.
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And so yeah, on the HCBC side, you know, stay on the preaching team and continue to do that, and then, more and more of this next year, transition fully into the association role.
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Okay, so let's talk through really what the association is all about, because I know that at least people at Wells Branch Community Church and beyond know that we're a part of an association.
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But what exactly does that association do?
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It helps catalyze church planning, obviously, but how do we do that?
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Yeah, several things.
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One is, when you think about the process of planting a church, there's getting your church ready to plant, everything from elder board alignment, staff alignment, church vision casting to the basics, nuts and bolts of resourcing.
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Like man, if we're going to plant a church, we're going to have to give some budget to that.
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We're going to have to give some staff time.
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The lead pastor is going to have to give time to that.
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I'm going to have to give some staff time, the lead pastor is going to have to give time to it.
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And just figuring out those nuts and bolts and then helping to recruit church planters, whether it is an internal development process like you got a great young guy that you've developed and discipled through the years, you've seen him grow and cast vision for that man could you be a church planter and seeing that individual eventually plant or on the external side, and that's where there's a good blend between the member church, like a Wells branch, and the network, because it's easier for the network to be that front door and to be out, like stirring up conversations at conferences or in different places where you might find plans for seminaries, bible colleges, that sort of thing, to cast that vision, to say hey, god is bringing a lot of people to Austin to include Elon Musk, joe Rogan and obviously we've had McConaughey here for years.
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Donahue, you're here for years, but a whole mess of people like this isn't Detroit or a San Francisco when people are like leaving.
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Yeah, the population is genuinely decreasing significantly year over year.
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It's not here.
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Right.
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And so having a heart for and what we believe is God's heart, right, when you read the book of Acts, you see that the church multiplied as it began to spread from Jerusalem into Judea and Samaria and beyond.
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And the way it's interesting, the way Luke writes it.
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He writes it just matter of fact, right, the church was growing, it was strong and it multiplied, right.
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And he plants these little kind of markers along the way in the narrative and it's like just normal.
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Yeah, like, oh, yeah, yeah, what'd you do this?
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Yeah, we plant another church.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, we multiplied disciples over here and started church, had to appoint elders.
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Yeah, like, okay, and forever.
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Then wouldn't it not make sense that he is still building his church in similar ways, right and principle-wise, as a multiplicative engine, and then just to continue, like, okay, the association then helps with.
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Every October we run a planning conference bring guys in um from all over the city to stir up not only those guys who may be called but also those churches.
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Be like man, how do we get in the game?
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Yeah, right, we've stalled out.
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Man, we've gotten in the in the tyranny of the urgent that every elder board lead pastor staff fights against.
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This thing popped up this week, this thing popped up the following week, and being able to wrestle your time and energy and leadership bandwidth away from those kinds of things into like, okay, we still have to be making disciples, sharing the gospel and multiplying churches.
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Okay, so let's talk about, I think, the the necessary ingredient.
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And.
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I would say 15 years ago, 20 years ago, 15 years ago we were crushing it.
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Oh my gosh On church planning.
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Yeah, a hundred percent.
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And there were church.
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Planners were everywhere.
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Like everywhere you look, there's a church planner.
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I remember being in Austin at the time, every person I met was like I just want to plant churches in Austin, right, and it was like weird.
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And I was like okay, and I was like I guess it fits for the city and you know and I was like I remember I met with, you know, lazarus Brewing Company.
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Oh yeah.
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Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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So I met with that guy back in like 2012, 2013.
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Right, and this guy goes yeah, I'm going to plant a church, but the way I'm going to do it, I'm going to start a brewery.
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And Holland, and I met with him on the east side, we're just like whatever.
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Okay, that's one way, buckaroo, and he did it, he did it.
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Now I don't know if he's got a couple of house churches that meet like on Kind of use the space or whatever.
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Yeah, kind of use the space.
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But it was like everything was imaginable, everything was happening, but that was at the tail end of it, right, of that period of time, right, but it feels like the church planter vineyard is in a dry season.
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Yep, and you were remarking, like at the Houston Church Planting Network, they said something, so tell me about that.
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Yeah.
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So our brothers over in Houston, chad Clarkson, bruce Wesley and the HCPN guys they had their August kick back off right Meeting, gathering everyone in the city to get back after church planting after the summer, as we're, all you know, getting into that back in the ministry season mode, and I was watching the recording of the meeting because we love those guys, learn from those guys.
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And Bruce Wesley, he made a comment that I just like yeah, that's exactly what we're seeing here in Austin and what you just articulated he made.
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The comment is like the church planter pipeline is like the Ezekiel Valley of dry bones and what was, to your point, call it from 2000 to 2012, just to put some years to it.
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You're right, it was the thing to do, it was sexy.
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It was the heyday of Driscoll X-29, matt Chandler Everybody functional was planting churches.
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100%, 100%.
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And I think we saw towards the end of the teens that church planting kind of fell out of vogue.
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And then 2020 slammed it shut yeah, agreed, and church plants are closing left and right because our culture had to shift, and this is my.
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I would love to hear your observation, just because I'm going to give you mine.
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So pre-COVID we were as a church and I don't think I realized how spread across the political spectrum we were.
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Yeah right, but in 2020, we were just as red as we were blue.
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I think 2020 happens.
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Our church decides.
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I guess we took a crazy conservative right-wing stance in that we went with we're going to meet and masks are optional so when we said we're meeting and masks are optional, everybody on the blue side of the aisle they were gone.
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And so then, all of a sudden, our church had to restart with about you know, there were some that were just you know, they just weren't around.
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But we went from an average of adults of 330 to, you know, we started again back in person.
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We had like 65.
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Yeah, and then slowly over time, and now we're about 250, 260 adults not and I'm not including kids back then, when we're 330 plus kids.
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So whatever, that was right, but 250 adults now plus children, it it was um kind of wild to see we had to grow from a almost half of the I don't know what the right word for that.
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It's as if, because we made the choice of we are non-mask or mask optional, right we're meeting in person it cut off a whole segment of the population without and they didn't come back.
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And I don't know if they're going anywhere, but they definitely didn't come back to our church, right, and I think because we are maybe a little bit more on the conservative side in the sense that we are complementarian and we're unashamed about that, we have male elders and male pastors or whatever, right that became a in the DEI world of all, that we're pretty diverse as a congregation, but in that sense a lot of people checked out, so I thought that was kind of wild.
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I just want to see what was at Hill Country.
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If you guys experienced something similar, yeah so the dynamics were exactly the same, depending on what your political leanings were.
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Either they aligned with the decisions the church was making and you were like, great, my church is doing what I think they should be doing, or they did not align Notice, not scripturally, politically and because of the political difference.
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To your point.
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The same thing happened at Hill Country, to a larger degree, where they chose differently.
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Now the question is why?
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Yeah, and I'm not smart enough to think through these categories.
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So I'm basically going to quote things I've heard Ed Stetzer say, because he's like the master researcher and all that in evangelicalism, researcher and all that in evangelicalism and what he has written on, and so if you Google Ed Stetzer and some of these terms that I'll use here in a second, you'll find his articles.
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And so.
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I'm just leveraging his work, so that's my footnote.
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What he said is you can break American Christianity and really American people into four groups, right, the first group is convictional Christians, and those are people who love Jesus, read the Bible.
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They are not just giving lip service to their faith, but they are convinced of who Jesus is, what it means for their life, and about 25% of the country, give or take, is convictionally Christian.
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The next 25% is congregational Christians.
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These are the folks who, hey, they come on Christmas, they come on Easter.
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If you were to go to their house right now, knock on their door, be like, hey, do you guys go to church?
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Yeah, what church you go to?
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Oh, I go to Wells Branch.
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When was the last time you've been there?
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And they're like, uh, right, and they would struggle to tell you outside of, oh, we're there last Easter or whatever.
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They are in the congregation at some level, but is Jesus really Lord of their life?
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Right, yeah, probably not, probably, not, probably, not Right.
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And then there's another group, another 25%, that is culturally Christian.
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And this is really the Achilles heel of the Bible Belt in Texas, which is largely this idea that, hey, I'm American, I'm not a Muslim, atheist, buddhist, so I guess I'm Christian, right.
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And again you'd ask that group of people Muslim, atheist, buddhist so I guess I'm Christian, right, right.
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And again you'd ask that group of people like, okay, so tell me how that works out in your life.
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Well, I try to be nice to people, right?
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And you would be hard pressed to find any scriptural, biblical foundation for a genuine faith.
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Right, right, and that's 75%, right, so what's the other 25%?
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And this is the growing population.
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This is the um, the rise of the nuns.
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This is people who and this is what I think has happened culturally and what happened in particular in 2020 is it no longer served you to be one of those first three groups?
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The convictional Christians stayed there, yeah, nothing changed.
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But those middle two groups didn't slide into the convictional, they slid down into the nuns.
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They're like, it doesn't really help you.
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You know what I don't believe in?
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That?
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Yeah, right, and now it's just more acceptable to be like.
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No, I don't believe that, and not only that, it's even turning a little more militant in that, and that's wrong, right, if you believe those archaic like oh, there's two genders and all the hot button issues, right, right to life, all those things, right to life, all those things.
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And so what has happened is the growth has come from those folks just naming what has already been happening.
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And that's like, yeah, I don't believe it and so I will, instead of like play this game where it's like, yeah, I'll say I'm Christian, but you're really not and you don't really know that, so you take them at their word.
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But then, if you look underneath, it's like they're not, like they were always there, right, they're just sorting themselves out, and this is why Steser calls it the great sort.
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What happened in those churches is those people who were nominally Christian just gave it up.
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They weren't actually with you, they weren't actually following Jesus, but, for whatever reason, it's what their parents did.
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It's like, hey, I got this Sunday routine and that's no longer the case, and so they're gone, yeah, yeah.
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And I think that's challenging because I think for a lot of churches the people that you were trying to reach were in your own church.
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That's right and, to be fair, our elders and I just kind of randomly went and did a count of all the people we knew that don't know Jesus at our church and about 10% of our Sunday population is not saved Right Any given Sunday.
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We know who they are Right, they know who they are, which I really appreciate, and they're coming and they keep coming and I get to preach the gospel to that 10% every single week and I make sure to kind of have a.
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Hey.
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Here's an opportunity for you to respond.
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Text Jesus to the number on the screen kind of thing.
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And that's been a real blessing.
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And continually, I think, the ministry year 22, 23,.
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We saw 40 people get baptized at our church.
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23, 24, we saw 20.
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This year we're starting off with a little bit more oomph.
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We've had seven so far and August was our beginning of the year.
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So since August, 1, seven, and I think we'll have like another five in the queue.
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So what that means is that we're still having people come to Christ, which is great.
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In fact, one of our biggest stats was, I think we had 25 new members, or 30 new members of the year, and six of those were baptized at our church, and that's a huge, huge, like.
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Usually, what was it?
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10% is what you're sort of going for.
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Yeah, conversion rate yeah.
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So like you're supposed to get three usually, and so we kind of double that, which is amazing, right, but we're still at.
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What I'm seeing here overall is we're still trying to recover.
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Whatever it was we lost people wise.
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The convicted christians are doubling down, I think because the culture is so anti right christian, yeah, biblical values and so they are like this is my life digging in, which it's been really cool to see a lot of our church people that were maybe in the past a little bit less vocal about their faith are now digging in.
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So I think to your point the convicted Christians are like hardcore, and I think the cultural Christians has fallen off and they don't care.
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No, they don't.
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They're just really naming what was true already, right, and it just became more clear through COVID and again them feeling freer to be like yeah, so I am and I'm out, so one of the things I've noticed over the past post-COVID is and this is sort of what I've sort of seen is that smaller churches that got hit have died.
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Yeah, I just know two churches in round rock is actually like three or four, yeah, three or four, so like three or four, and just around just round rock in the past month and a half.
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Yeah, past month and a half, three or four churches gone, like I like the exchange church which was just up the road here, great church, more of a charismatic stream, but great, and they were about 250, 300 before COVID, wow, and then COVID smashed them and again I don't know all the details of it, sure, but they folded and they sent all their people to Shoreline, and Shoreline, you know, they love Jesus and that's their stream, and so that fit, and I was sitting there going like like there was enough people there to kind of continue to do a church, but you know what?
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There wasn't a leader, right, and I think that's what we're to the point of the church planting pipeline.
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There is a vacuum of leaders, even coming out of seminary.
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I think you and I mentioned this like several years ago.
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I think Aubrey Malfers at DT, at Dallas Seminary, had a whole like slew of people in the 2000s into the teens, and now that's sort of dried up and I think the entrepreneurial Christians that are maybe wanting to go be a pastor or call it a pastor, they're not.
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I think they're thinking twice about church planning, without a doubt.
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Hey, let's go to an established place that can pay my salary, because I've seen the battlefield and the church planter the carnage of church planters everywhere their families are destroyed.
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The carnage of church planters everywhere their families are destroyed.
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The church has died and that can't be what God has for us.
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Yeah, why would I sign up for that?
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Why would I?
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sign up for that Right.
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And I think, you know, in the association I think we've been hit like everybody else but God, and this is the part where, like God likes us more.
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I just know, you know, it's like you only know what you know because that's your sphere of influence.
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But, like through covid, you know, midtown church, uh, led by jake box, downtown, by the campus, got a building that they're no longer in a school.
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They have a permanent facility there at uh 45th and Red River.
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Red River.
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And that's huge.
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Yeah, I think Huddo got land and a million dollars to build a building and they're almost done with their building.
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Northway built their building.
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Redemption City got land.
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I think Crossroads is almost there.
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But, we're moving like a lot of.
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I saw a lot of movement within our association of God, moving the gospel forward in spite of whatever you want to call the COVID lack, right, what would you say that's?
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I don't know if we can put a, I don't know, a reason on it, but just if you've noticed that and then have you seen that Maybe you have eyes that are beyond the horizon of just the association.
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So you're with Houston or whatever.
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Have you seen anything similar to that anywhere else?
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Yeah, so, obviously, the asteroid strike that was COVID and obliterating churches is a real thing.
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And even to what you were saying, the four churches that we know of in our neck of the woods that are closing or have closed recently, the reverberations are still happening.
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So we in the association have not seen that.
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And the question, okay, well, what's different and what I keep running into is relationships, right, right, so Jesus sent them out two by two, right?
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When every pastor of any church nowadays stands up every fall and we launch our small groups, what the pastor will say in some regard is hey, everyone in my church, just so you know this whole Christian thing.
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You can't do it on your own.
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Your faith is personal to you.
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You have to have a personal relationship with Jesus, but your faith is never private.
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You actually can't grow fully in Jesus by yourself.
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You need your brothers and sisters.
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We have been put into a family.
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We are one in the spirit, right?
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The dividing wall has been taken down, ephesians, and we're now one.
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We're made one in Jesus.
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So again, we would say like, you have to be in a small group.
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Okay, totally believe that.
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So wouldn't it make sense that that applies to the pastor too?
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Right.
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And so what we have seen and this is absolutely God's grace, that because through COVID, we, by the Spirit's leading, doubled down on the relational side that the pastors in our network truly growing together as a group of guys, a group of brothers, who are fighting the fight in our little pockets around the city, but gathering monthly, getting away in a retreat once a year, grabbing our wives and having us as couples together.
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It is the bulwark against the pressure that guys feel when the enemy comes at them and all the different things to where and we do not cast one stone at any brother who is like man.
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I got to take a break and step away, praise God for you and the time that you gave to it, and God's not done with you, right?
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However, our hope is the health of that individual, their family, their marriage and the church for a long, long time, and so then, what it comes back down to is okay, who do you have pastor in your life that really knows?
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So, like when you and I grab lunch before we record this man, we're talking about stuff in ways that we can't talk about in a lot of different, right, because we know yeah, we know what it's like when we get that email, when we're trying to preach hard stuff and you know, some people like yeah and most people are like what?
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yeah and everything in between, and so having a network of brothers that you are legitimately relationally connected with, like your friends.
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Yeah, I think this is important because I think a lot of pastors feel like the maybe, when you go down that dark path of isolation as a pastor, it's like you're having issues at your church and you think I'm the only one that's having issues at my church.
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So, and you pastored for seven years.
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You planted a church, pastored for seven years.
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You planted a church pastor for seven years and then you took a sabbatical and then you ended up at Hill Country Bible Church as an executive pastor.
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Talk to me about that transition and just the some of the beatings you took as a lead pastor.
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That man I don't know if it would have made a difference, or you know God's calling all that, but what.
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what difference would have made if you had a church playing network like this?
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All that, but what?
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difference would have made if you had a church playing network like this, oh my gosh.
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Well, we were at the point where it's like man, we're at 150 people, we're looking to buy land, it's about to take that next step in the growth curve, or whatever.
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People getting baptized, right.
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A lot of good stuff, and then the enemy sowed seeds of discord.
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Talk to me.
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What were the seeds of discord?
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Because I think I've experienced that.
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So how does the enemy?
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Obviously our battle isn't against flesh and blood, right, it's against the spiritual forces of darkness.
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But what kind?
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I don't need to go into details, but what was the situation like when enemies started sowing seeds of discord?
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Yeah, so as you grow, one of the things you have to do is reimagine and shift people's roles and responsibilities right.
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So the way you do say men's ministry or women's ministry when you're a church of 70 is different than how you lead that ministry when you're 150.
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Exactly so you have a leader and this is what happened with me who was leading one of those ministries, and we were having conversations about how that leader needed to change, because the ministry grew from what it used to be and you can't do the same thing.
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What got you here won't get you there 100%.
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Well, what happened and this is what the enemy sewed in is that person interpreted what I was doing as getting rid of them versus what I was trying to do, which is like no, let's grow into here's the new job description, right, and here's how you need to grow into this, and we're going to work together.
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And they didn't believe that.
