Connecting with people and helping them grow as disciples requires a new playbook and a new way of leading. Ann Michel interviews Stephen Handy about how his Nashville church is reaching and discipling people in unchurchy ways, getting to know their neighbors, forging new missional partnerships, and focusing intentionally on relationships.
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Ann Michel: Under your leadership, McKendree UMC has significantly enlarged the concept of what it means to be a church in relation to its neighbors by leveraging its building and developing community partnerships. Can you say a word about your ministry there?
Stephen Handy: One of the things we discovered early in my ministry at McKendree is that we had to give ourselves away to the community. We needed to know who our community members were, who our partners were, and we needed to put a listening ear on the ground, as opposed to just showing up on Sunday or Wednesday night Bible study. So about 12 to 13 years ago, we set about giving our building away. We wanted people in the community to occupy the building so we could build relationships with people who don’t come on Sunday.
One of our first partnerships was with a group called Monroe Harding which serves young people who have aged out of foster care. They wanted the third floor of our building which was unused except for a Sunday school class of nine people. There were eight women and one man in that class. When I told the eight women that Monroe Harding wanted to bring probably 40 to 50 young adults a week into our space, they said, “Absolutely, pastor.” The one gentleman said, “No. We’ve had this space for 40 years.” And so, I said to him, “Do me a favor, go home and pray about it. When you hear from the Lord, call me.” On a Tuesday, he calls and says, “Pastor Stephen, I think it’s a really good idea to have young people on this campus.” I said, “Thank you for being so diligent around praying and listening to what God has for us.” That relationship has been ongoing for 12 years. Last month, we were mentoring about 210 young adults in that space. They will probably never come to church. But here’s what we discovered: They’re willing to have a conversation about their faith. So, we can build what I call the culture of discipleship in that space. You don’t have to use churchy language. Jesus didn’t use a lot of churchy language. He used the metaphors of the marketplace. Since then, we’ve added five or six other missional partners, and the building is being used Monday through Friday at about an 85 to 90 percent occupancy rate. We are creating spaces where relational capital can be built. We are using the church building as a laboratory, a space of experimentation.
Ann Michel: If a church wanted to reimagine its mission as you’ve just described, what are the first steps they might take, beyond prayer, as you’ve already mentioned?
Stephen Handy: I’ll tell people, “Prayer is not a plan.” You’ve got to put some footsteps on your prayers. We discovered early on that we needed to know who our neighbors were. So, the first step was listening to the community. We divided up the blocks surrounding our church building and assigned lay people to walk those blocks—not only prayer walking, but introducing themselves and asking community members, “If you could do anything downtown, what would you like to do? And how could the church help you do that?” That data pointed to a few needs. One was belonging. People living in downtown high rises felt isolated. They worked all day. They went home to sleep. They woke up the next morning and did the same thing. On the weekends, they stayed behind their doors. So, we discerned an opportunity to leverage our space for community. Now, we have a rooftop as a venue for weddings and musical events. We host a “Trunk or Treat” in our seven-story garage which draws about a hundred cars. You don’t have to be a member of our church to take part.
The second step was asking our church, “What do we have the capacity to do?” We can’t do it all, but we can do a few things well. That led us to reach out to our ecumenical partners in downtown Nashville. Homelessness is one concern we held in common, so we decided to be in partnership to resource unhoused neighbors. But it was initially a tension point because our churches had isolated themselves for years for fear of losing members to one another. It took us years to decode what it meant for churches, clergy and laity, to be in partnership together.
Ann Michel: In your book Dare to Shift, you and co-author Michael Bowie use as a framing element the biblical story of Jesus’s disciples pulling their fishnets up empty and then being invited by Jesus to cast their nets on the other side of the boat (John 21:6). Why is this such an important story and what are its implications for leaders today?
Stephen Handy: In this story we see how after the disruption of the Resurrection, the disciples retreated to what they knew. They’d been with Jesus three and a half years. But they erased those days and hours and weeks and years and said, “Let’s go back to what we know.” Similarly, I think when the church finds itself in unpredictable, unexpected times, we retreat to what we know. We seek a place of comfort. But nothing grows in comfort. As leaders, we need to tell people to expect turbulent times. The question is, are you prepared to push through them when they come? Because they will come. In this biblical story, Jesus says, “Don’t do what you’ve done. Cast the net to the other side.” At some point in time, we are all going to have to cast our nets on another side, because fish don’t stay in the same place long.
Ann Michel: The subtitle of your book is Challenging Leaders to a New Way of Thinking. You write about needing to engage in a mindset shift. Can you describe some of the elements of that necessary mindset shift?
Stephen Handy: You can’t change your actual behavior without first changing your mind. You can’t shift your behavior until you have a deep self-awareness of who you are, where you come from, and what your identity is. It’s a great catchphrase on a Sunday morning to say, “We have the identity of Christ.” But the question is, do we have the behavior? Do we practice mindfulness? Every day for about 30 minutes, I sit still and do nothing. It is the hardest thing for me because I’m an extrovert. I love being around people and I love being busy. But in the biblical text, Jesus probably spent a third of his time resting. He was refocusing his mind on the next assignment that God had given him. He was creating capacity. When you have a steady mind of Christ, you have the capacity to do the assignment that God has given you.
Ann Michel: You also describe a framework for leadership built around the “Four I’s”: Invitational, incarnational, intercultural, and impactful. Can you say a few words about that framework and those elements?
Stephen Handy: So, the first critical idea on this journey of faith is invitation. Think of the biblical story of Jesus meeting the woman at the well. Jesus takes the risk of extending an invitation to a woman he shouldn’t have been talking to in the first place. They engage in a conversation. I always tell people that discipleship starts with an invitation. But more specifically, it starts with a conversation. Jesus starts this invitation with a simple conversation. “Tell me who you are.” We tend to tell people what we know. “Let me tell you about Jesus.” And I say, “Wait a minute. They may not want to know about Jesus.” So, I think if we can reclaim the posture of asking questions as opposed to providing the answers, I think people are more inclined to have a deep conversation with us. I say, “Don’t invite people to church, invite them for a cup of coffee.” And after you finish, have another cup of coffee. Sit at the table because you want to listen. It’s more important to listen than to have the right answers.
The second critical idea on this journey of faith is incarnation. What does it mean to be in the world? What does it mean to be incarnational? Part of that is understanding your community through asset-based community development. You’ve got to ask questions and keep asking those questions. You need to live into the questions as opposed to saying, “This is the answer. Let’s move on.” This is an ongoing developmental phase of becoming who we are in community. Being incarnational means we are the embodiment of Christ in the world. Not within the walls of the church where it’s comfortable, where I know everybody, and they know me. But out in the marketplace, where I must be careful and self-aware and other-aware. That strengthens my faith because I must rely on God to navigate me through these episodes of my life.
The third idea is being intercultural. Being intercultural simply means that you’re willing and able to navigate through subcultures that may be unfamiliar to you, but you’re curious about them. You really want to know the person who’s on the other side of the table, who’s on the other side of the street, who’s in the grocery store. I love going to grocery stores because I get to stand in line. There’s a person in front of me and behind me that I can engage in the conversation as we move towards the cashier. When Jesus met The Woman at the Well, who was of a different culture, he showed his humanness by acknowledging that he didn’t know enough about her and being willing to explore a deeper conversation.
The fourth, impact, follows if you do those first three things well. Impact is the evidence that Christ is not only in community, but Christ is active through the hands and the feet of God’s people. But here’s what I think we’ve left out—the heart of Christ. We often say we’re the hands and feet of Christ, but it’s only through knowing the heart of Christ that we can be the hands and feet of Christ.
Ann Michel: As an associate district superintendent, you’re a leader of leaders. What do you see as essential to help other church leaders learn to lead in some of the ways you’ve described?
Stephen Handy: First, one of the characteristics of leadership I see in Jesus that we very seldom talk about is humility. Scripture says he was humbled all the way to the cross. Being humble doesn’t mean that you bow down. It simply means you are willing to allow people to take the lead and you’re willing to follow. I’ve discovered there are leaders who are better at this work than I am, and they’re called laity. They’re smarter than me. They’re more courageous than me. They’re more reflective than me. Some are more scholarly than me. The Wesleyan tradition was a lay movement. Yet our clergy have become professionals and have taken that movement away from our laity. We’ve developed solo leaders. We’re not trained or equipped to follow. We’re trained to lead people all the time. We send a pastor to a church to rescue it. But Jesus sent the disciples out two-by-two. What if we were to reimagine leadership as a two-by-two formation, as opposed to one-by-one.
Second, we’ve got to be courageous. We have to be willing to take risks, and when I say risk, it means to work through, “What’s the context? What’s the challenge? What do I need to know? And who am I going to walk with?”
Third, we have to develop interculturally competent leaders. We know about our tribe. We know about our family. But we don’t know about others. We’ve become so insulated in what we know, that when someone tells us something different, we disavow and devalue it. But really listening to something I may not agree with stretches my theological frame and makes me a better person. If I’m hanging out with just African American men, it’s a boring conversation. If I add African American females, Anglo females, Anglo males, Latino females, Latino males, Korean females, Korean males, you see how the conversation shifts? And we all become better at the beloved table of Jesus Christ.
Fourth, we have to stay curious about who Jesus is. When Jesus puts us on a path to engage new people it helps us discern and discover who Jesus is and what God is calling us to in this season, not as individuals, but as community.
Ann Michel: You have written compellingly about reclaiming and reimagining the concept of discipleship. How do you define discipleship and how do you invite people into a life of discipleship?
Stephen Handy: Discipleship for me is the understanding of Jesus—his philosophy, his patterns, and his practices—so that we draw closer to God through Jesus and we’re willing to share that with others. Discipleship is not a curriculum. It’s an apprenticeship of practice. Because Jesus didn’t have a curriculum.
I’m mentoring a 27-year-old African American male who showed up out of the blue at our church one Sunday with his grandmother. I asked him, “What brought you to McKendree?” He said, “On your website, you advertise that you make disciples. I’m not looking for a church. I’m just looking to be discipled.” Interesting, right? We assume you come to a church to be a disciple. Yet in our four Gospels, Jesus is only in the temple three times and none of them turned out well. We don’t have any indication that he invited the disciples to show up there. So, this young man knew something about the biblical text. Every Thursday, we get together for a cup of coffee. Each week, we discern together the discipleship practice we’re going to do and then hold each other accountable. It’s the Wesleyan model. If you say you’re going to follow Jesus, where’s the evidence? We’ve been at this for two years.
Ann Michel: In your book, you also write about discipleship being formed around a common table that draws people into meaningful relationships rather than placing them into programs or a discipleship system that is a series of check boxes.
Stephen Handy: We’ll build a program in a heartbeat. We love to come out with another program. But discipleship is relational. So, I think we’ve got to create capacity for healthy relationships. We just launched a new project called Common Unity Gathering. The gatherings are in coffee shops. No more than 20 people. It’s by invitation only. We won’t blast it out on social media. It’s at tables of four to six people. The conversation is theme-based for one hour. You discuss that theme, and then we ask, what did you learn about God? What did you learn about yourself? And what did you learn about your neighbor? Our dream is to launch 10,000 of these in the next 10 years.
Ann Michel: Part of the mindset shift you describe in your book is to focus less on problems and more on possibilities. I think this idea offers a real word of hope to churches that are struggling. How can leaders learn to embody hope?
Stephen Handy: First, who are the people around you? I surround myself with people of hope. If we follow Jesus, this Jewish rabbi who wasn’t Christian, he is always showing us ways to be more hopeful as opposed to getting stuck in the chaos that our denomination and American churches in general are dealing with. We are stuck in the language of decline. But maybe it’s not so much decline, but rather a reorientation. I see it as God is saying, “That’s no longer working. Here’s what’s coming.” So, how am I living in the “becoming of the church”? The church has always been in transition. The question is, are we willing to be in transition with the church? To give away what we think we know because it’s not enough?
The other part of that for me is that hope is not abstract. There is evidence of hope every day when I take another step forward. I get drafted into these communities. I get drafted into these conversations. I get drafted into my family members. I’m always seeing evidence that God is calling us into those places among the people. That God is already there waiting on the miracles and the movements to happen. We need to redefine the church as a movement as opposed to an organizational structure.
Dare to Shift: Challenging Leaders to a New Way of Thinking (Market Square Books, 2023) by Michael Bowie and Stephen Handy, is available at Market Square and Amazon. The Dare to Shift Workbook is available at Amazon.
Related Resources
- 7 Steps for Making Disciples Through Relational Mentoring by Ken Carter and Audrey Warren
- 7 Mindset Shifts that Can Reshape Your Church’s Future by Lia McIntosh, Jasmine Smothers and Rodney Smothers
- The Bright Promise of Alternative Faith Communities by Ann A. Michel
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