Venture Unfiltered Episode #3: Hillsong, Church Scandals, Celebrity Pastors

Venture Church. How you doing, Pastor Tony, Pastor Brandon here Venture Unfiltered Episode Trace, which means three. We haven't been canceled yet. We haven't been canceled yet. We might after this one. This is the one where we get we dive a little deep. The last two. You know, I've been not necessarily hearted, but we haven't really said anything that's like super controversial, like the Earth is flat. We had a lot of feedback, Pastor Brandon, from the staff relationships that you discussed in staff descriptions. People thought, maybe I don't want to say any names. Pastor Cole is upset. Anyways, we missed a couple of people though, Okay, they were upset. They were upset that we didn't mention their names. So now, if you're listening for the first time. Last week, Pastor Brandon described our staff and if we were all one big family, which relative would they be? And you had mentioned that Pastor Nicole was the aunt who took care of us when mom and dad were gone. Pastor die was she was mom who told us what to do to clean our rooms. We never and you were Dad, You were just simply Dad. You didn't go into any description. Are you the fun dad. Are you like you just said, I'm Dad. Sometimes I functioned as dad, sometimes I was kid. It just depended on, yeah, the metaphor that I needed with Okay, we missed a few staff. Here we go our youth pastor, Pastor Johnny Johnny. I would describe Johnny as if he was the really fun neighbor kid that would come over to your house and mow your grass for free and always called you mister beals. I don't think you know Johnny well enough. He would never do that. Ever, he would come mow your lawn and battle vandalized your fence. Well for me, he does that. Yeah, it's because you're as pastor. Try being his direct report. Pray for him, folks. All right, Pastor Alex, our exact pastor, m Alex Alex is like the guy your parents rent their house from. I'm sorry, Okay, let's just keep going. How about Heather Lane or a bookkeeper. Really get myself in trouble here. Heather. Heather is like the grandma that you love that always gives you candy. You know, it's so funny. I go in her office once a day because she has a jar of candy there. But The rule is if you go to get kind, you have to sit and talk to her. You have to say you can't just come in take candy. Yeah, she's like the grandma that gives you andy. She is grantee grandma and auntie. Um. Okay, how about your executive assistant Tina? Tina. Tina is my sister in law in life and in this fictional world we live in. So I know you don't care much for it. I'm glad you tried it, though a lot of your staff watched The Office. I'm a Diehart Office fan. I've visited the set a few times now. Took my youth kids there one time on a missions trip. Well, we had some free time. I would say, if you were to relate your staff to the Office, here's who I'd say. Morgan is Andrew Andy Barnard. He loves to sing. Is that that Ed Helms character? That Helms character? Cole is Jim Halpert. Cole's totally Jim Halpert. Nicole Pastor Nicole Stanley. Okay that I do agree with Nichol. When I watched The Office, I went to Nicole one time when I went have you ever seen The Office? You know that character Stanley. You're standing me alone to them across word. Uh. No, it's because she gets work done. That's why. Um, Heather's Phyllis. She loves her husband, Bob Vance of Vance Refrigeration. And you you, you would be you all the guys in the warehouse. It's really fun. Yeah. What what's his name? The dude with the fro? Daryl? Daryl? You're Darryl. That's true? All right? Um, Hey, recently you were at a fundraising event and something happened. You told me about it, and I felt really bad for you. Do you want to elaborate kind of tell the world what happened? You're really gonna make me talk about this? I think you should. I think this is Venture unfiltered. Let it be healing for you. Our church was going to make a large donation to an organization, and uh, they asked if I would come to their fundraising and make the donation there. I don't really like lots of attention for things like this, Yeah, but I thought it's for this organization. I'm representing Venture. And when I checked in, they had my name wrong. They had me listed as Michael, not Brandon, and so I was like, actually, my name's Brandon and they waiver registered as Michael. I showed him my ID to prove my name was Brandon, and then the nineteen year old that was checking people in fixed it and she said, all right, we have it right, and they handed me a bid card. It had Michael's name on it still, but that was it. And then when we were making our donations and I lifted up my bid card, they thanked publicly Michael Beals. Now right now we will drop maybe some video of this later. If you're listening, I am holding in my hand your bid card that says my Michael and Diuebeals. This is like, you want to stay humble be in a setting like this, Yeah, humility, speaking of humility, Michael. And at least did they say d Beals or Diebals? A lot of people say d Beals. I was pretty blinded by it. And I was so stunned that number one they said my name out loud anyways, and that number two they said it wrong. I just was like, this is mortifying because I had so many friends there and my phone blows up. Everybody's like, hey, Mike. One time I was speaking Pastor Brandon for a youth ministry of a very very large church, and they invited me to speak, and I went into the youth pastors say, hey, I want to vite up our guest speakers from Seattle. His name is Tony Matter. Come on up, Tony. Okay, I know none of this is the topic at hand. Yeah, the most mortifying ministry thing that ever happened to me. Oh no, I had just gotten credentials, so I was twenty one. I was going to my I had just got my first full time ministry job at Bethany and Everett, and I was going to network conference. And back then they would give you a like a booklet of all the ministers with their picture. But I specifically never remember getting my picture taken. So if they didn't have your picture in this kind of yearbook thing, they would just put the little Assembly of God symbol there. So I expect you, and so you kind of you get this thing and they're going through all their business which you don't care about, and you're kind of looking for all your friends in there, and you want to see it like this is a big deal. I went from never having a relationship with Jesus to now being a licensed minister. I wanted to see my name and the yearbook. So when I flipped to my name, shockingly, they found a picture of me that I put on my call application, where I was wearing a hat backwards. That wouldn't have been a problem picture, but because wearing a hat and church back then was so inappropriate, they removed my hat and drew in hair. This is before photoshop. This is I don't know how they did it. Did you know? From that moment on they ceased doing the yearbooks. So the very last yearbook has this hideous picture of me with drawn in hair. So for years, every time I would go speak at a church, one of my friends would put that picture up before they introduced me. This is brandom Beals with the fresh fade over here. Thirty years later, I still am called Michael Beals, Michael de Beals. You know, as pastors, it is good for us to get humbled. We need to get humbled, and we wanted to talk tackle topic today. That is it's kind of out there, and unfortunately it's been It's not just out there, it's just been more prevalent recently, and it's humbling for all pastors, humbling for those who are in ministry and those who are no longer in ministry, Pastor brand I would really love to start chatting a little bit and dive deep on just what's going on in the church world with pastors moral failures. And I mean, and I preface with us, Hey, I'm a man under authority, but I'm also a flawed man. So I'm not this Please here our hearts. We're not bashing or saying anything negative about someone, but these are questions we've been asked by a lot of our people adventure, Hey, how did you hear about this person? What happened? And then they hold us to that standard. They ask us questions like, hey, how are you with your marriage? How do you guys handle finances? There's a lot, Um, there's a lot going on in church scandals. You want to kind of unpack that a little bit. So this is the you alluded to last week that we were going to talk about the Hillsong documentary, talk about it, So this is what has we'll talk about kind of sparked that, Um, I guess I would start by saying a couple things that. Number One, this stuff has always happened like this, This stuff has always gone on, and pastors make mistakes pastors mess up. There's issues like this. It's been going on again. Now it's way more high profile and everybody knows about it because of social media. It also is a lot more public now because we have so many megachurches and the quote unquote celebrity pastor phenomenon, and that has made the aliures of ministers that much more profound and impactful. I would preface everything by saying a couple things, so to kind of, I guess, provide some ground rules for this discussion. As you're listening to this, I want to say I have a lot of friends in ministry and I respect the way you do this. Like ministers were home team, we support each other that oftentimes, if you ask a minister about any of these things, they will refuse to comment. And they do that because you know, if we ever messed up, we don't want anybody commenting on us. We don't want to be called hypocrites someday. And so all that to say, I'll talk about it because you're asking. It's not just me. The reason why is I mean, I go out to lunch with a lot of people from our church and hang out with them. This is kind of a topic that's just been coming up with our people. I think it's because you have documentaries like the Hillslong documentary that's on Hulu. Yeah, and done by large jury a journalism organizations. So that's why too. I think this is something I think our people are asking. So here's here's how I would lay a foundation for this. I think it's important for every single one that's hearing this to understand that churches are led by humans. They're led by people just like you. And as a minister, I'm human, and as a human, I am desperately in need of God's grace. I'm desperately in need of his mercy. I'm desperately in need of his forgiveness. I spend hours a week meeting with people whose lives have blown up because of bad decisions they've made, and they cling onto the grace of God and the mercy of God in their life. I want to say, first off, ministers are humans. They do dumb things, and they are just as worthy of grace and forgiveness as anyone else's Now. I also accept that the Bible is really clear that when you accept the call to full time ministry, or whether it's full time or not, when you accept the call to ministry, there's greater responsibility that comes on leadership than on those you lead, and a lot of that is I always look at it this way that just as there's a God in heaven who loves us and who wants the best for us and has got a destiny for you in a future for you, there's an enemy that's trying everything he can to thwart that future and that plan. And if you were the enemy, the greatest impact that you can have for what you were trying to accomplish is you get the leader to screw up. So, just as the average person in the church is dealing with temptations and pressures, you can multiply that by a thousand for the leader. And by the way, that is not an excuse. It's not to screw up, James says. It really simply that we are tempted when by our own evil desires we are dragged away and enticed. Every single one of us is tempted. We deal with these things that we can blow up our lives if we do. And one of the interesting things about temptation is the devil only tempts us with things that we would be interested in like he doesn't tempt us to do something we wouldn't normally maybe in our flesh want to do. So that's why it's called temptation, because you take a person, if they are in the wrong place at the wrong time, they are capable of doing the wrong thing. So as a minister, we have to avoid the wrong place and the wrong time so that if we're in a moment of weakness, we won't be tempted to do the wrong thing. It's also important, like when it comes to the thought of temptation and messing up, that what you are going through is not different than what I'm going through. Like you don't have temptation that's worse than your neighbor. You don't have temptation that's more extreme than the guy down the street or the gal down the street. That like temptation that comes to us. Paul said it himself. He says, it's common to man. We all deal with the same thing. So your situation isn't more extreme than mine. Like oftentimes people will come and they'll say things to me like Brandon, I'm about to tell you something that you've never heard, like as if man, And that's the thing that they've done is so horrible that no one's ever heard of before. You've been doing what I've been doing for thirty years. There's no story that you have not heard before. Yeah, but you hold on to God's word. God's word is clear. There's no temptation except what is common to man. But God is faithful. He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. And if you are tempted, he always gives you a way out. So as we're kind of laying a foundation here, I would say ministers are humans. They're people. They do dumb things sometimes, just like everybody else does a couple other things, and then we can dive into this. Sure, this is the one that I think is going to get me in trouble. You're always in trouble though, you know. Come on, it's not like you're not out of trouble. There is, in my opinion, a difference between making a mistake and having an affair. By the way, they're both mistakes. They are both sins in the eyes of God. They're both wrong. But someone in the wrong place at the wrong time can do the wrong thing. It's a one time thing. It happens. There needs to be repentance. There needs to be disciplined. But why I think an affair is substantially deeper than a mistake. It's more than a mistake because an affair is calculated. An affair is I have thought this thing through, I have worked with the other person on covering this up. There is multiple mistakes that lead into an affair. So when you talk about a minister, I believe there is the difference between this guy screwed up and he made a mistake, like he did something, repented, he walked through discipline, he did it. There's a difference between that and having a full fledged affair. Statistically, an affair eighty percent of people that have an affair reoffend again have an other one. Wow, eighty percent. So that is because when there's so many decisions along the way that lead to that choice, that lead to that long relationship that happened before it became exposed, that once you have crossed that guardrail, it's just easier to cross it. The second point, now, again, it's why ministers teach all the time you need to a fair proof your marriage. So if you mess up, you've had an affair before, you just need to make sure that you a fair proof your marriage. Yeah, yeah, And I think I would call that almost the point of indifference, where it's like, man, it's just going to happen again, and I you know it is what it is. I here's a here's if we're talking stats, here's what's crazy. So we are part of the assemblies of God. Both you and I are ordained ministers. Our movement is the largest evangelical movement in in America. We have thirty seven thousand credentialed men, Pedecostal, parismatic. Ye. Did you know on average? Do you know how many moral failures a week our movement has? All right, probably five three? Can you believe that? So thirty seven thousand people? And I think also for us, which is I mean what a lot of these stories about people who have kind of had some moral failures, A lot of them, we find are non denominational churches. They don't have really an authority. I mean you and I, Yes, you're my authority, pastor random, but we also submit to an even a higher authority than us, and that is our denomination and the men and women in place over us. I think it's here's something no one told me about ministry that I had to learn the hard way, and it's not out of a failure of anyone. There's just a lot of pressure. Like, yeah, you have a lot of pressure at your finance job, and you have a lot of pressure at your remote job, whatever that may be. But the pressure of people's lives a lot. When someone comes to you in their worst moment, that's a lot. When you hear it often, that's a lot. And you always feel pressure, and you feel pressure that this person needs you and that person needs you. And this isn't like me lamenting, This is me saying, you know, these are the things of ministry that we really have to consider if you want to go into it, man, you have to be right with Jesus. And there's a lot of pressure that comes with it, which leads if you don't handle the pressure as well and steward them. Well, yeah, I get why people mess up. I totally understand you. One of the things that both of my bosses, so I had two pastors that I worked for, Pastor rob and Pastor Bertaux, and the one thing that they both said that was exactly the same thing. And they would say this to me fairly often. They would say, Brandon you will never understand what it's like to sit in this chair until you're sitting in it. Yeah, the amount of pressure and the way this is a conversation that I have with our board members all the time is I try to explain that the pressure from this it's just different. It's not it's not a spirituous and that's why it's calling. Yes, and that's why you do this, because it is your act of worship unto Jesus, to serve his kingdom in this way. And you're fulfilling what God called you to do when you responded to an altar call and and things like that. But are we on the same page that I think we are making GoodWork. There's a difference between making a mistake, yes, and an affair. They're both sinned, they're both wrong, but I think one should have one needs much more restoration than the other. And both you and I have friends who are ministers who have had moral failures. And both of us have friends who are ministers or we're ministers who went through the proper process of healing and restoration, totally restored in a minute, really restored great, doing great. And then we have some who said, my hands are in there. I'm done, yeah, and have chosen a different route in life. Where should we go next with this? What do you think? I think we can talk through if you want to ask my thoughts on the Hillsong thing. Okay, so here's the thing. My wife and I we are huge Ted Lasso fans. Okay, did you watch the finale Season three? I actually have not yet. Okay, brings bring a box of Kleenex. I'm just saying there's a lot of nods to a former seasons. So we were on Hulu the other night trying to find a new show, and the Hillsong documentary came out. Now to preface, here's some background. I got stayed in twenty ten. All I ever listened to was Hillsong. The first preacher I ever listened to outside of Venture was Carl Lentz. So when people are always like, why do you preach so loud? Why are you always yelling? I learned that from Carl Lentz. I just thought, and that's you two. You're a loud preacher. I just thought, that's kind of what you do. You just gotta be a little loud in people's faces. And then I watched in Touchments Strea. One morning, I thought, oh you can also be quiet. Hey, I was only loud because my first seventeen years of preaching adventure, I didn't have a monitor, so I never knew how loud I was God morning. So they've had a huge influence on my life. They've had a huge influence globally, hundreds and thousands of people who attend their church. They're on almost every continent except Antarctica. I mean, it's pretty crazy. This documentary is was it through vox is that? Who did it? I don't remember. I think it was. Was it Vox News? It was regardless, it's a secular organization. You have Carl Lentz who had a massive, massive moral failure, and not just him, but now they're unpacking a lot of the failures from Hillsong and then they interview him, which, by the way, after his moral failure, he was radio silent for like two years, was on social media, you couldn't find him, and now he comes out on this documentary documenting all of it. It is a lot. If you haven't watched it yet, I'm not necessarily saying you should. I'm not recommending it. I'm just saying we watched it. We're in ministry, what we want to know what to do and what not to do, and just you know, flags out there, what are your thoughts on it. I knew the story because it's probably the third documentary that's come out. It's the most compelling one because you finally get to hear from Carl afterwards. I think ministry over the last twenty years, in the social media age, has become uniquely complicated. Yeah, by the way, I think it's all a shame. It shouldn't have happened. I think the biggest thing that I took out of it was the finding out that he had had an affair before that was very firmly covered up. That it is the benefit of being assembly of God. So if you're hearing this you're from Venture Church and you say, why are we assembly of God? Well, one of the number one reasons that we're a part of a denomination is there is oversight and accountability. For me. Now, I know that there was a time in Hillsong's past that they were ag but by the time this happened, they were fully self governing by then. Yeah, and so the affair with the nanny comes out and it kind of gets swept under the rug, and then three years later there's another this affair that becomes public comes out. You don't deal with it right the first time. Shame on you that it happens again. I mean, this shouldn't have been a surprise to anybody that happened again. But in our movement, if we have something like that happens, we immediately resign. We have to resign our church. We're forced to. We lose our credentials. Yeah, we go through two years of restoration where we meet with counselors, coaches, we meet with denominational officials, other ministers, and then they determine after those two years if we're fit to do ministry, so we know if we if something like that is committed, we have to step out of ministry. What happens sometimes at nondenominational churches they have the pastor take they kind of keep it quiet, They just deal with it at a board level, and they have the pastor take up month to two months sabbatical. I'm growing on sabbatical in July. That is not why, Yes, just letting you all know. And then what happens is if you have to deal with sin in a way that it leaves a scar, because the scar is a reminder of Wow, I made a mistake or I hurt myself and now I'm healed, I'm better, but I got a scar that reminds me of it forever. And that's why. Fast forward, after all this comes out, we're seeing Carlentz two years later, and so I actually kind of respect him now in a crazy bizarre way, because he took two years off. He thought what I did before didn't work. This time, I'm just stepping out of ministry and he has been publicly shamed. I mean, nobody needs to beat that member too. Pastor Brandon, this guy was a pastor, not just of a local church, but like he pastored celebrities, athletes, musicians, so people in pop culture, people who are well respected in culture. So he had his platform was massive. But here's what I got from it, and this might be a controversial take. You see the man go through rehab, You see the man go through restoration. Obviously he's not going to ever work for Hillsong again, nor does he want to, is what I gathered. But then all you see him at the end is saying, I love, I repent of my sin, and you just see him fighting for his family. Well, that was the thing that I got out of it, is he talked about it took all of this for him to realize what matters most because he was about to lose it, and it was his wife and his three daughters. And in the end, he just thought, I just gonna fight to keep them. And if this is all I have, this is this is what I'm what I'm gonna get. I really admire that now. I want to say something that I had never heard the phrase celebrity pastor until I was meeting with a buddy about ten years ago. And social media is now everybody's on Twitter, and everybody was on Facebook, and I think Instagram was just kind of starting right around then, and so everybody talks about their followers and this and that and different things. And it was the first time I heard the phrase celebrity pastor. I'd never heard it before, yea. And that has killed a lot of our churches and ministries because what happens is a minister to be really honest. I mean, you don't start off in ministry thinking I'm gonna be famous someday. You don't start off in ministry thinking anything other than God has called me. I want to take as many people to Heaven with me as I possibly can. Like all of these ministers that have had epically bad moral failures over the last five years, when they were in their early twenties, their hearts were totally pure. But something happened where people desperately need heroes, and as we talked about last week, Jesus is supposed to be the hero of the story. No, you're dead right on. So what happened in the Book of Judges. God wanted to be their king. He wanted to be their judge. He wanted them to trust to them, and in the end they started demanding, we want to be like these other nations. Give us a king, give us a king. And God said, all right, I'm gonna give you what you want. Who do you want? We want that tall, dark, handsome guy that everyone looks up to. And God said, fine, you want Saul. You got Saul, and he gave them what they wanted. When in the end God wanted to be their king. And this thing that you and I do, Jesus is the hero. Yeah, this is not about Brandon, it's not about Tony, it's not about David it's not about die. This is about Jesus. We live to make Jesus famous. And what happens is fame is seductive. And some of these guys after a while that you just start believing your press clippings. When everybody says everything you do is great, when everybody tells you you're the best preacher we've ever heard, when everybody wants to go to your events or wants you to speak at their stuff. After a while, you start believing it. And think of it this way. What was Lucifer's greatest sin? Lucifer was the worship leader in heaven. He spent we don't even know EON's telling all the angels in heaven worship God, Worship God, Worship God. I can imagine that there was a moment when people started saying, you know, you are a really good worship leader. And after a while he was like, you're right, I am a really good worship leader. So it went from worship God to worship God, Worship God, worship me, worship God. And it was worse of me, man, it was just worship me, worship me, worship me. And I think that is one of the number one things that as a minister, especially of a large church, you have to fight against. This is not about the books that you write. It's not about the number of podcast downloads that you have. It's not about like I have friends that are some of the best worship leaders in America, and for years their goal in life was to write a worship song that Hillsong would put on one of their albums, because then they would be set financially for life. I want you to process all of this and think, how do you think Jesus feels about all of this. He's like, I thought I called you. I thought I thought I was supposed to be the one that was made famous. This isn't about you, It's about me and and I think the seduction of celebrity is the number one thing that God is trying to exercise from the church. I think most people of you would ask them now, they would say, there's not really any hero preachers anymore. That is the way that it is supposed to be. We are like irrelevant. We are voices, We are spokesman. We are just people that are telling everybody how great God is. If people start saying I'm great, then they haven't heard my message or delusional because I want to talk about how great God is, and I will say this that that is the fault of immature Christians too. Yeah, that immature Christians crying out for a king and God gave him. Carl Lentz. Part of me wonders, too, how many I mean, we all have our insecurities, but how many insecurities go unhealed or go uncorrected, which then turn into you know, what are the three biggest issues pastors end up having? The moral failures? Money? Sex, and power? It's always those three and they're always related, always related. Let me ask you this. You've been a ministry how many years? Now? A lot, a lot, thirty your well seasoned, we'll say that thirty years, three thousand people at venture, multiple campuses, Everyone tells you how good of a preacher you are. What's kept you humble over all these years? Getting called Michael Beals? Uh, I'm totally calling you Michael Beals now for the rest of my life. I let me, let me, let me do this instead. I have one last thing I kind of would say about that, and then I'll answer that. Let's be clear that one of the ten commandments is that you should have no other God. Before me. When we idolize a minister beyond Jesus, we're putting another God before him. That's an idol. We are this fall. I'm going to do a series through the book of Jonah. In Jonah's prayer, which is just an amazing I encourage people to memorize it. It's Jonah chapter two and Jonah makes this statement. He says, those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs. Wow. And I think there is this innate thing inside of us that wants an idol that we can hold on tom because we serve a Jesus that we cannot see that, we cannot have an audible back and forth conversation with that we believe by faith, and sometimes what we want to do is just have Tony b our Jesus instead. But the problem is you're not Jesus. You're a human and you are going to screw up probably before you go to sleep tonight. And that's because we're human and we're not we're supposed to serve Jesus. And I think God is like literally crucifying that within the church. He is He's cleaning house right now. He is this is what we need him to do. So what do I do? I actually, I want to answer it by saying I thought through this, and I know this is getting wlong, but please bear with me. Please hear me out, church friends, anybody that's listening to this podcast. This is my advice for people. This is my advice to you as a minister. It's also my advice to you. So you need preachers in your life. You need pastors in your life. You need men and women of God that will preach the truth, speak into your life, challenge you. You need them. So just because a few guys or gals screwed up, don't like blame us all because the vast like Tony quoted whatever it was, thirty seven thousand aging ministers. And if you do the math, and I'm really good at maths, so three times fifty two is one hundred and fifty six, so out at pretty good, isn't it? So? Out of fact check that please? It is I the So so thirty seven thousand ministers, Yeah, that's barely a percent. So the vast majority of ministers are faithful. Serve Jesus, serve you that they are living godly, righteous lives full of integrity. They don't want attention. So let's let's be clear that we don't throw the baby with the bathwater, so we need that. So but how do you how do you find a church? So this is going to get me in so much trouble with so many of my friends. I love all my friends from all the churches, especially all of you that bring me in to speak all the time. But number one my advice to people is you should seriously consider going to a church that's affiliated with a denomination. I don't care which one, but if a church is nondenominational, ask why I will? And being assembly of God, the assemblies of God allows us mission, vision and values exactly what we feel called to do. There's no interference with us fulfilling the will of God, the style of our church, the style of our services, the look, feel, our name, but they provide oversight of the ministers. Are are there times I don't like it, absolutely the times I want to bash my head against the wall because of it. But in the end, if there's an issue with Brandon, our movement steps in and deals with me. So every person that attends this church gets to know Brandon has covering it. Goes beyond just a board of elders that they might think are my friends that we have covering. So my advice would be, I would go to a church that's affiliate with a denomination. That's number one. Number two, I think no matter who the minister is, you need to observe the level of visibility of the spouse. So people should know who your spouse is. If if you're a woman minister, they should know your husband is. If people should know who Aerial is. Like if they see your spouse and they know your spouse and your spouse, whether your spouse is an upfront person, behind the scenes person, they should not wonder I wonder if Tony's married or not. Yeah, they should know. I should see you with your spouse at some point, Tony, Oh, there's no question. Yeah, there you should. You should observe the visibility level of the pastor and his spouse. So one of the greatest levels of accountability that I have is there's not a person that comes to venture that does not know diabeals his Brandon's wife. My wife is highly visible. If he meets everyone in the lobby all the time, that visibility. Then it's simple things like is your pastor consistently going on vacation. Do they have a regular habit of going on sabbaticals and things like that, healthy outlets. If they're not doing that, be afraid burnouts, because we have a job that people do not understand, and if we are not un consistently resting, recharging, reconnecting, disconnecting, we will blow up. And if your pastor brags I haven't been on vacation in five years, seriously, that is not a badge of honor. That is a sign go to a different church. Because he is number one not honoring the sabbath. But number two, he's going to burn out, blow up, and it's gonna be bad because this job has pressure, and the enemy is smart enough to know that when you were weakest and most weary is when he is gonna pounce. And when he pounces, you don't want to blow up. I love the board at Venture and I love them because the number one thing they care about is that we get away. We rest our entire staff. Yeah, gets consistent sabbatical. I'm going on sabbatical in a week with five staff going on sabbatical in the month July. And but but we do that because we want you to rest and relax, and you come back and you're refreshed and vision charged, but you're not weary and weak. So I would say another another way that a pastor avoids these things happening is, um, you need a teaching team, ye make don't make it about you. If you're a part of a church and the pastor says, oh, man, I'm preaching fifty out of fifty two Sundays a year. I mean the whole thing is built on that person platforms, and that is going to become a negative thing in the future. Two other ones, real quick, ask your pastors often do they talk about do you have safeguards built up? What are the safeguards? What are the things you do that make sure that when you're in a certain place, you're not making a bad decision. Everybody knows that I love going to Vegas. I'm a huge Raider fan. I'm a huge Vegas Nights fan. It's a cheap flight from Seattle to the Sun. So I go to Vegas. Well, you've been there with me a bunch, you know kind of what I do. It's borderline, it's it's hilarious. It's like I'm an old man, it's like it's like what is it? It's like eight pm? And you're like, Okay, I'm done, I'll go where are you going? Like I'm going home, I'm done, Like PB, it's only eight pm. And right into the room and you're there's a sporting event that I'm at. Yes, i am a room by eight. Because bad things happen in places like Vegas yep, the later at night it gets and so I'm making sure I'm not in those bad places. So you set up guardrails. You you you have things like that, and you talk like some people they don't travel alone and and different things like that. You set up guardrails. The last thing that I would say is does your pastor have a hobby? People get annoyed all the time because they know I love sports and they know my whole life seems like it's a hobby sometimes. But rejoice that your pastor has a hobby because that means he or she has something that they get to disconnect and recharge their batteries, that they get a due, and that means that these are people that are doing that are using self care. And don't be bitter if your pastor has a hobby. Because maybe you don't have one yet, or your pastor goes on vacation because you haven't gone on vacation. That's not their fault for trying to attempt healthy routines in their life. Yeah, I don't. Don't punish your pastor because he has balance or she has balance, and know that hobbies prevent burnout. But those are just some simple thoughts. Uh. Those are things that I would encourage people to practice, things that I try to practice in my own life. I think those are brilliant Pastor Brandon, And honestly, I man, I honor you. You know, I know you get a lot of people who look at you and say, man, I love your sermon. I mean I hear it when I stand in the lobby with you. That's awesome. And you know you just you deflect it. You go all thanks so much, appreciate it. Glad God spoke to you. That's that's something you taught me. Glad God spoke to you. If you live by the praises of men to die by their criticisms in one or out the other. Hey, this was a really solid episode. It went a little longer because there was a lot to unpack, and I think we just want to remind everyone, Hey, we love the local church. We love ministers. If a minister has fallen, we love them. We want to see every person in a right relationship of Jesus, serving him, loving him, making him the hero. But also we have to realize there's a reality where that doesn't always happen, and it can happen to me, it can happen to you, it can happen to anyone listening to this. You don't have to be a pastor to have some things happened in your life, but just make sure you have those conversations. Hey, thank you so much for listening. To date. Next week, Pastor Brandon, we have a special guest. I'm out of the country of the age. Should we tell you? Should No, let's surprise them. I'm not gonna tell everyone, all right, Hey, love you so much. Thanks for listening. Guys like subscribe. We'll see you next next week with Pastor, I'm not telling you who it is. It's not how you think it is. I think that's why see it m