Being Willing to Fail - Ep 4
Show Resources:
Culture Coach Podcast with Nikki Lerner - 5 Challenges for Multicultural Leaders
Show Transcript:
Kyle Brooks 0:02
Welcome to the Multiracial Ministry Mindset Podcast. In a world that feels more divided than ever, leaders in multiracial ministries face unique and imposing challenges.
Bernard Emerson 0:13
Our goal is to equip you with the principles, stories, and tools you need to lead a unified people in a divided world.
Kyle Brooks 0:21
We're not church growth gurus, and Multiracial Ministry is not a recipe for numerical growth.
Bernard Emerson 0:27
However, it is a recipe for growth in the fruit of the Spirit. When we lead multiracial ministries well, we can disciple a new generation of Christians attuned to how the Spirit of Jesus is speaking to the spirit of our age.
Kyle Brooks 0:40
So my name is Kyle Brooks, and I am a white pastor from East Oakland.
Bernard Emerson 0:46
My name is Bernard Emerson. I'm a black pastor from East Oakland.
Kyle Brooks 0:49
And together we pastor at a church called Tapestry church, a multiracial expression of God's kingdom, right here in Oakland, California. Welcome to the Multiracial Ministry Podcast.
Bernard 1:02
Well, welcome to season one, episode four.
Kyle 1:06
We are talking all about overthrowing fear in multiracial ministry this season. And in particular, this episode, we're going to dial in the cultural practice of being willing to fail.
Bernard 1:22
Yes.
Kyle 1:26
You sound so excited. Everybody likes to talk about failure. Almost guaranteed when you look at the metrics of this episode, it is going to be the least listened to Episode over the podcast. People are like, no, no, I don't need that. I don't need to be willing to fail.
Bernard 1:42
Yeah, you do.
Kyle 1:43
You do you do you need it. You need to be willing to fail for multiracial ministry. And Pastor B, would you tell us what what shaped this being willing to fail takes when it comes to being a cultural practice of a ministry or church? S
Bernard 1:58
Yes, sure. We courageously experiment with new ideas. We are willing to fail. We know creativity is stifled by fear. And leading the church world is creative work. And we know that in the end, we're either have a win, or we'll have a story.
Kyle 2:21
Yep, that's exactly right. This mindset of being willing to fail, helps us see like, Hey, we're coming out of this, either with a winner is we're with the story. So it's a win win either way. But part of the practice is, as you mentioned, at the beginning of that courageously experimenting with new ideas. Why is that a core practice for a multiracial ministry in particular?
Bernard 2:49
It is a core practice in multiracial ministry, in particular, because you are going to fail. Not once, not twice, not even three times, but over, and over and over. And that's not to discourage anybody.
Kyle 3:08
And Jesus says 70 times seven.
Bernard 3:10
No, that's not to discourage you. But it's to get you into practice of being courageous in your ideas.
Kyle 3:20
If you're gonna fail over and over and over anyway, why not be willing to? In multiracial ministry in particular, it is just, it's normal. Yeah. Right. It's normal to fail because there are so many different types of folks. There's so many different cultures at play. There's so many different perspectives. There are so many different layers of of willingness to do or not do different things. Not everything is gonna work.
Bernard 3:46
Listen, anytime you're mixing races, any time you're missing ethnicities, cultures, look, you could expect it. Yeah, you can expect it. Things will not go perfect as planned.
Kyle 4:02
So if you're out there right now, and you're like, I'm failing at just about everything in my multiracial ministry. Welcome! We're so glad you joined the party because we feel like we've just been doing that over and over right for many years.
Bernard 4:18
Well, but we said we either have a win, or we have a story.
Kyle 4:23
That's right. Yeah.
Bernard 4:24
And I believe that sometimes the stories are better than the wins.
Kyle 4:29
Yeah, that's true. That's true. Wait, say more though about why you think that?
Bernard 4:33
Because from stories, we learn what not to do, the next time. Stories we could use turn encourage somebody who has failed. With stories, you get to tell, you get to share your experience and dealing with a particular problem and with someone else that may help them along the way. So I think at times stories are better than the wins because like, honestly, how often do we share a good experience or a bad experience?
Kyle 4:37
Right. Well, and with the good experiences what do you learn? How many of us have come away from like, really knocking it out of the park and going like, oh, I learned so much from my success. Nobody There's wisdom in the stories. Yeah. And, that's part of the reason why we keep trying new things, because there's so much wisdom to be gleaned from the failures. And so like, when we when we first started, let's just share a little bit about one of our
Bernard 5:39
Bible study. I know you're going to talk about it. The Bible study.
Kyle 5:49
Over and over again. We had a particular challenge with midweek gatherings. How do we get our people, we talked about in the last episode, how do we get our people into each other's lives on a regular basis so this is not just an aesthetic diversity thing. This is a uniting thing. And, you know, black folks and white folks and folks from other different racial backgrounds have different church ways, and different ways of getting together midweek. Like, I don't know, for my white people out there. You might not know that not every church in the world does small groups. That might suprise you, but that is not the only way.
Bernard 6:25
For us, if you're doing a midweek Bible study on Wednesday, you're knocking it out of the park.
Kyle 6:31
At the church. The pastor's leading It's basically a second service. There are very legitimate different ways to me. if you're in a in a Korean church, you might meet every morning at 5am for prayer service. There are totally different legitimate ways, wonderful ways to meet midweek as a church. We were dealing at that time when we first started with a mostly black and mostly white congregation. And we were struggling to figure out, how do we get these people together? So we started by setting the bar super low. Tell us a little bit about the dinner parties. What did we do at dinner party?
Bernard 7:13
So we used to have these dinner parties. And, you know, I feel kind of bad for saying this because we used to try to strategically engineer them. Where we had certain people meeting and that just like failed miserably.
Kyle 7:34
And we would have like, a different four people at every dinner party. They would always be like, Oh, this was so lovely. And then there's not come back. It was like, once a month, it was super low barrier of entry.
Bernard 7:47
And not to mention that we like, surveyed our community and people are just like, I want connection. Right?
Kyle 7:55
Right. And who doesn't like food, right? It's like the one thing that seems to be true, multiracial
Bernard 8:01
Right! In every culture.
Kyle 8:04
Everybody likes food, right? Turns out that's not true. At least it wasn't an art contest, right? We had tried these dinner parties. And then we surveyed the whole church. We're trying to figure out what is it that people really want? And we got back that people want a bible study and we were like, kind of surprised. It's not like very avant garde church, planty stuff. But like, yeah, that's kind of our wheelhouse. Let's do a Bible study. So I remember the very first one that we had at the house that that we live in now. But it was like before we we were able to remodel it. And this was like the ceiling was falling in. We had like a donated couch from a friend. And there were a bunch of people there like our living room was packed out. And, and it was pretty diverse group.
Bernard 8:53
Yeah, it was it was. I give us points for that.
Kyle 8:56
Yeah, except no men, there. Wasn't gender diverse. So there's that. But, besides that, it was very diverse. I remember we started going around and asking folks to read, you know, one verse at a time of the scripture that we're gonna be reading. And you remember what happened next?
Bernard 9:15
Oh, yeah. Yep.
Kyle 9:17
How could you forget.
Bernard 9:18
A seizure out of the blue?
Kyle 9:21
Somebody passed the Bible. And they are about to read the gospel portion of the scripture and hit the ground. Start seizing. The whole group.
Bernard 9:33
And I remember in particular, three women were working with her. And the rest of the group was praying. And thank God those three just happened to be nurses.
Kyle 9:45
They happened to be nurses. They just come for the first time that Sunday before. They showed up to the Bible study, it was the only time they showed it to the rival study. But yeah, they nurses, just taking care of her until the ambulance got there. We pulled a couple other people aside to pray for her. It was wild. It was wild. And then after that, we're just like, Well, yeah, Bible study is over. It was not not necessarily the way you want to start. And then after that we just had like a different three people every single time. So people would come to one, and they wouldn't come back the next week, and they come back three weeks later, and they'd be like, oh, man, but I didn't see so and so and so and so because they, you know, people aren't coming consistently. So we tried dinner parties, we tried a formal Bible study. And finally, when we started getting deeper with people into why we weren't making that a priority, we realized, oh, it's because there isn't real connection with folks. And they're not willing to commit to the connection because they're not confident that other people will commit to it. So we had to create, I mean, going back to our systems and structures episode, we had to create a system and a structure where we actually mutually committed to each other for a season. And that's what that's where we started connect groups. That took us what, a year.
Bernard 11:12
A year.
Kyle 11:13
Just to figure out your structure that would work for meeting in the midweek, where it's like in an homogenous church, you kind of is kind of given to you maybe like everybody just expects a certain thing. And everybody dives in because it's their cultural way.
Bernard 11:27
And then it was the year and a half on Zoom. But I will say, those connect groups served in keeping the majority of our people together during that pandemic time. And I would say that really through Zoom is where people really started connecting with each other.
Kyle 11:50
Yeah, that's right. That's right. And, you know, so we learned a lot through that experience. Yeah. Because we failed over and over. I think one of the things we learned is that like, people that come to our church, multiracial community that people, everyone from like, recently homeless, or returning from, you know, being in prison, all the way to, like, executive level people at a law firm, or Google or whatever. Like, they they don't come for a low barrier of entry, they come because they're committed to this, this crazy vision of the kingdom of God. And so we learned like, oh, we need to meet people where they're at and call people to a commitment.
Bernard 12:29
I want to share with you, share with you, you already know it.
Kyle 12:32
I mean, I'm here. So I mean, what seemed like a huge failure. That gave us a good story. Okay. And that is when when we were putting our when we were talking about merging churches, we were looking for somebody who had did the same thing, or something remotely close to what we were attempting to do. And I remember we had these friends that merged a white and a Korean church net, and I remember specifically, one of them telling us, don't be surprised if a year from now, you won't have 80 people that started with you. 80%
Bernard 13:10
80% of the people that started with you.
Kyle 13:11
Yeah, I remember that.
Bernard 13:14
What he said. Yeah, right. Nah, not us. I mean, 25. I'll give you but 80, yeah. And I remember specifically to Sunday, you turn to me, and you said, Man, do you realize it's only a few people from Oakland Communion here left? And then I'm just like, nah. And then I counted. And then the so that made me count the people that came with me, and I'm just like, where did they go?
Kyle 13:43
Yeah, yeah.
Bernard 13:44
Where did they go?
Kyle 13:45
Yeah. Yeah. So a year in we ran the numbers. And 80% that had started with us were gone. And thankfully, there were people who came right. And we were about even for the year, but still, yeah. 80% attrition. So this is not church growth strategy. Not at all. We don't know how to do that. But, you know, the people who did come where came for the comittment, came for what it is.
Bernard 14:17
I believe they get the vision. They get what we're trying to do. And they're all there.
Kyle 14:25
That's right. That's right. Yeah. So one of the reasons that in a multiracial ministry we've got to be willing to fail is that the principles for building community for leading ministries and churches for for the most part, have been written and taught from mono racial or mono cultural perspectives or organizations or seminaries or Bible schools, right. Like most of our ways of building community have come from homogenous points of view.
Bernard 15:02
Nobody put out a book on how to lead a multiracial Bible study.
Kyle 15:06
Yeah. Well, if they have we haven't read it right. And basically, there were no books about multiracial ministry. Well, multi ethnic ministry, maybe except for like, 20 years ago, maybe. Like, that's when it kind of started. So I mean, in the whole history of the church, like 2000 years, that's like 1/10 of 1% of the years. So we're basically starting from scratch, which means we gotta be willing to mix different ingredients and figure out how to do it by trying and failing.
Bernard 15:42
I mean, the cake may flop, but at least you made a cake.
Kyle 15:47
And you learned just how much flour not to put. I mean, any anytime we mix different races, different ethnicities, as you said, we we should be expecting to fail at least half the time. Yeah. So give us an example. I mean, this seems like it could be a principle that we just like, adapted from, like, entrepreneurial podcasts about failing fast, you know, and breaking things on our way through to success. That's not where we're getting it from. It's not what we're talking about. Can you talk a little bit about the biblical grounding for this mindset of being willing to go into something that God is calling you to do? Even if you know, you're gonna, you're likely to fail?
Bernard 16:36
Well, I think of Jeremiah. God called him and said, they're not gonna listen to you, but I'm calling you anyway. I mean, if that's not a recipe for failure, I mean, God Himself told him they're not gonna listen to you. But I'm calling you anyway.
Kyle 16:57
Right.
Bernard 16:57
And if he knew in the beginning, that he was walking in to failing,
Kyle 17:02
Put that on your perspective. Your church planting prospectus .You know, God said, I should do it, but I'm not going to succeed. Would you donate to this ministry?
Bernard 17:12
And you said something that sparked a thought. And just like, it's more important, what God is calling you to? Not the measure of success you think it ought to be.
Kyle 17:25
That's right. That's right. Yeah. So I mean, even the title, I mean, even the topic that we're talking about right now, it's a little provocative in the sense of, we have to take a step back and say, What does failure mean? And failure in a ministry context? I mean, we've been talking about it from the standpoint of like, what you're trying is not really going to work the way you think it were. But ultimately, what it really means is not following God's lead. Not obeying Him when He says to move. Not obeying Him when He says to start not obeying Him when He says to stop, that's real failure. And in that respect, you can succeed all day long in multiracial ministry. One of the things we tried a while back, was to try and meet our Spanish speaking neighbors, where they were at.
Bernard 18:15
Whoa, whoa, we went all out.
Kyle 18:18
We did. I mean, we're mostly black, mostly white church. And we were like, maybe God is calling us. I mean, we think God is calling us to reach out to our neighbors who are Spanish speaking. And of course, we can't do that unless there's Spanish involved. So I will say, while I was out on paternity leave, A decision was made that I fully support.
Bernard 18:47
Before we get before we get there, we got to mention the translators. The translating system that we purchased.
Kyle 18:55
Oh yeah, oh my gosh. Well, that was that was partway through the process. Okay. So I if I remembering correctly. So there is a decision that we're going to go to fully bilingual services. And in line with our philosophy of ministry, we don't want anybody to feel like second class citizens. So we're not going to do normally on Sunday to Sunday basis, a headset thing where somebody in the back translating, not that there's that's wrong for every context or anything like that, but for us, it felt like that would be sending a message to Spanish speakers that this is not right. Your house your guests here. So we did fully consecutive translation and several people told us don't do it. That's not gonna work. It's just not.
Bernard 19:41
Well, and not to mention that we started out doing it line by line. We start out doing a line by line and we quickly were told that does not work.
Kyle 19:55
That was whiplash. So we started doing it like paragraph by paragraph or thought for thought, right, which works a little better, except that it still didn't work. It still was exhausting for the people who were part of it. Not to mention during the Spanish translation that English speakers would be asleep. And vice versa. It wasn't working for Spanish speakers, either. So, you know, we got to a point where we're, we realized about six months in that this isn't working. It's not serving our English speakers. It's not serving the Spanish speakers that are coming to visit because they're intrigued. There's a space for them. And they realize as is too hard. This is really too hard. And we had to be willing to pull the plug and to name it as a failure of a sort. Not a failure, from the standpoint that we followed God's lead to do what we thought was consistent with his Spirit's leading. Yeah. And there were some other things that followed on that we could talk about in another episode, but I think it's important to name when something isn't working when something is and is be willing to, to move on and move on to its peak skills era and emotionally healthy leadership. He talks about the importance of like, necessary endings. There are just some things in ministry that just have to die. And it's always hard. But it's really important. And unless we're coming into it with an experimental mindset and a willingness to fail, we're not going to let it die.
Bernard 21:30
I remember when Florida State was moving off from this historic coach, and he was old. And I remember the athletic director said, what needed to happen eventually should happen immediately. Bobby Bowden was out of there. Yeah, would I remember him saying that? And I looked up that quote, he didn't actually make it up. He got it from somewhere else. But I remember him saying what should happen eventually needs to happen immediately.
Kyle 21:58
Yeah. So a willingness to fail really, actually puts us in a place where we are also willing to lead change. Yeah, yeah, definitely, that we're also willing to lead change, then early die. And usually by the time we leaders are like, naming a failure that we have been a part of creating, our people already know. You want to set out a little bar people already know. Yeah, like they're experiencing it. They're sitting there wondering man, how long are we going to do this? Like, this is nuts. So it's important for us as as leaders, as facilitators of ministries and churches to be able to name failure when it happens. Yeah. And we can do that. Because we're not defined by it. Yeah.
Bernard 22:48
And you'll either have a win, or you have a story or you'll
Kyle 22:53
Okay, so one resource. I'm the I'm the resident recommender. So one resource that I want to recommend is one of our favorite people in the world. On the planet. Nikki Lerner. Nikki has a podcast called Culture Coach. And on that podcast, I mean, listen to everything she does, because she's brilliant and very wise and has a lot more experience in this area than we do frankly. Yep. One of the things that one of the one of the episodes that Nikki has talks a bit about this is called five challenges for multicultural leaders. You have to you have to scroll back a little bit because she is prodigious with her podcasting. She's got a lot of episodes, but if you if you look up five challenges for multicultural leaders, she talks about fighting perfectionism in your cross cultural relationships and in your leadership. And it's really worth a listen. So we want to encourage you. Nikki Lerner, Culture Coach, five challenges for multicultural leaders and everything else that she does is really worth you checking out if you want to grow in your leadership.
Bernard 24:00
Well, and in the future, we're planning to have her on the show.
Kyle 24:05
That's a call out to you right now, Nikki. If you're listening, we would love to have you on the show. All right? All right. Anytime. So friends, thank you for joining us today. We always want to ask you to like, subscribe, share, if you have enjoyed this journey with us. Yeah, if you've gotten anything out of this, subscribe and share the podcast. It's the way that our community can keep growing. And the way that this this model of multiracial ministry can continue to make an impact in the world that God loves.
Bernard 24:38
You can go to multiracialministry.com, and you can find us there. You can find us on all podcast platforms.
Kyle 24:50
And even some of the social stuff. Yeah, some of it. Yeah, we we had a whole debate about this. Yeah, some of it. Anyway, friends. Thank you for joining us today for multiracial ministry mindset and we will see you next time when we will be talking about apologizing quickly and fully. Alright. See you next time.
Bernard 25:16
We want to thank you for listening to the multiracial ministry mindset podcast, where we are dedicated to helping you lead a more unified people and a divided world.
Kyle 25:26
And if you enjoyed this episode, why don't you share it with a friend or follow and subscribe yourself and if you want to connect more, you can always find us at multiracial. ministry.com and on Facebook and Instagram at multiracial ministry mindset. See you next time.