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1. What have you found most challenging as a church leader?

Without question, the most difficult thing I have wrestled with as a church leader, is my own stuff! My own insecurities, my own weaknesses, my own internal struggles and hang ups.

2. How did you become a church leader? Can you please briefly tell the story?

I have grown up as a part of a local church and have always been exposed to opportunities to hear God's call spoken over my life. I have never felt called to anything else other than church leadership. I have had a number of different vocations over my working life, including sales, computing, mining and small businesses but all of those simply supported my journey toward full time senior church leadership.

My wife and I became senior pastors of our church in 2013, when our church was one service a week, and had no staff, no assets, but a heart to grow and reach its world. We have had heaps of fun over the last 7 years, serving Jesus and build His church.

3. How do you structure your work days from waking up to going to sleep?

My work week starts on a Sunday and I am up at 4:30am and am in the gym by 4:45am. After I am back home, I help with the morning routine of getting the kids off to school during the school week. I hit the shower at 7:30am. I am in the office or in meetings most days by 8:30am. We have church or meetings on most nights except for Wednesdays, which is date night, and Fridays.

I love simplicity, so my days look like this: Meetings Monday - Tackle Tuesday - Wrap It Up Wednesday and Think a Lot Thursday. Fridays and Saturdays are my days off.

4. What one book had the most profound impact on your church leadership? Can you please briefly tell the story of how that book impacted your leadership?

Leading With a Limp, Dan Allender.

Ha! This book was recommended to me by a leader that I admire. When he recommended this book to me he was in the middle of a leadership crisis, not of his making. I could see that he was determined to remain faithful and true to the character of Christ even in the midst of injustice. He was living the book. So when I read it, it had profound impact on me, and challenged my leadership paradigm to the core.

5. What's the most recent significant leadership lesson you've learned?

You are doing better than you think you are!

6. How do you develop a healthy leadership pipeline in a church?

This is a question for my wife!

Central to our organization is leadership development. It forms part of our vision statement. It needs to be the top priority of any growing organisation. This means there are many many opportunities, projects, brilliant ideas we will not invest our resources into because it will not produce leadership in our people.

The leadership system has to function well. There needs to be deep work done to develop, implement and maintain a pipeline that actually moves people forward into their leadership potential. This is what my wife is brilliant at!

In addition to that, there needs to be a healthy growth culture within the life of the organisation. This is achieved by senior leadership having an aggressive growth agenda for their own lives and calling people and teams to that same culture for themselves.

7. If you had to pick just one story, what would be the most meaningful story from your time as a church leader so far?

We are passionate about church planting and have spent the last seven years focused on developing a church planting pathway that raising leaders and plants churches in a way that is replicable and transferable.

12 months ago, when we asked our first church planting couple to consider pulling up roots and move out of the area to plant our first church plant, their reflection to us on the whole experience was quite profound. They said that the hardest thing that they had found about planting a Beyond Church was moving house!

This means so much to me because it points to the power of both, the Holy Spirit inspired growth culture, and the strength of the systems to empower people to do all that God has put on their heart!