Serving as Spiritual Formation (Part 4)
If you enjoy this episode, subscribe on your device for more:
iTunes RSS Stitcher Spotify
It is possible to integrate serving into your spiritual formation strategy in a practical and effective way. We’re seeing churches all across the country do it.
THE ROOTED EXPERIENCE
In recent years, churches we serve have been telling us they love The Rooted Experience. So, in part four of this series on Serving as Spiritual Formation, I interview Pastor John Thomas from Mariners Church in California about The Rooted Experience.
- How Rooted is helping people connect to faith and the church
- Why Rooted is so effective
- How Mariners Church encourages serving as spiritual formation
This episode is brought to you by Planning Center: an all-in-one software to help you organize your ministries and care for your church.
With an easy-to-use platform of products, you can bring people together with event signups, room and resource reservations, automatic volunteer scheduling, and much more.
Start using for free now at planningcenter.com.
Leader Conversation Guide
Want to take this conversation back to a staff or senior leadership team meeting?
Our Show Notes subscribers get a PDF download that recaps the episode content and includes a discussion guide you can print out and use at an upcoming meeting.
Opt-in here and get access to the full Leader Conversation Guide archive.
More Episodes in This Series
- Strategy for Volunteer Engagement – Episode 355
- Structure for Volunteer Engagement – Episode 356
- The Discipleship Opportunity with Daniel Im – Episode 357
- Spiritual Gifts, Serving and Growth Track with Chris Hodges – Episode 359
Share Your Thoughts and Questions on Social Media
We use #unstuckchurch on X (formerly Twitter), and we start a real-time conversation each Wednesday morning when the episode drops. You can follow me @tonymorganlive and The Unstuck Group @unstuckgroup. If Facebook is where you spend your time, I’m there, too.
Write a Review—It Helps!
Your ratings and reviews really do help more pastors discover the podcast content I’m creating here. Would you take a minute to share your thoughts? Just open the the podcast on iTunes on your phone or computer, click Ratings & Reviews, and leave your opinion. Or leave us 5 stars on Spotify.
Transcript
Sean:
Welcome to the Unstuck Church Podcast, where each week we are exploring what it means to be an unstuck church. Does your church have a clear, intentional process for discipleship that includes serving as part of spiritual formation? If so, are you seeing the results that you’ve been praying for? On this week’s podcast, Tony and Amy continue our series on serving in the church, as Tony sits down with John Thomas of Mariners Church for a conversation on how the Rooted discipleship strategy is helping thousands of people grow in their faith. If you’re a brand new listener of the Unstuck Church podcast, you don’t want to miss out on downloading the weekly episode show notes. Each week we share important information to support that week’s episode, offer some bonus resources, and give you access to our full archive of resources for when you listen to past episodes. To learn more, just go to theunstuckgroup.com/podcast. Now, before we dive in, here’s Tony with this week’s sponsor.
Tony:
This episode is brought to you by Planning Center, an all-in-one software to help you organize your ministries and care for your church with an easy to use platform of products, you can bring people together with event signups, room and resource reservations, automatic volunteer scheduling, and much more. Start using Planning Center for free now at planningcenter.com.
Amy:
Well, Tony, I’m excited for us to share this interview today. You know, one of the reasons why we wanted to include a discussion of Rooted in this series is because so many churches that we’re working with that we’ve served at the Unstuck Group, have been telling us they use it and it’s a big part of their spiritual formation strategy.
Tony:
Yeah, that’s right, Amy. It’s been coming up more and more often with the churches that we’re serving. And so in this conversation, I sat down with John Thomas. John serves as the discipleship pastor at Mariners Church. Great Church. They’re located in Irvine, California, and Mariners Church is doing a great work in that part of the country. John gave us a behind the scenes look at how Rooted came to be and some of the ways that it’s transformed their discipleship strategy, and especially how it has transformed serving at Mariners Church. So with that introduction, here’s my conversation with John Thomas. So John, before we dive into today’s conversation, tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at Mariners Church.
John:
Yeah, wonderful. So I serve here as the Irvine Lead Discipleship Pastor, which means I’m part of the team that’s in charge for thinking through our discipleship strategies here at Mariners Irvine, but I also serve as one of our central team leaders, so helping our seven congregations to think well about how do we implement discipleship across all of our congregations.
Tony:
Yeah, and for those that don’t know, all those congregations are within Orange County in California, is that correct?
John:
Yeah, actually beyond Orange County now down in North San Diego County, so seven across Southern California. And then we’ve got two more that are coming online here in January.
Tony:
Oh, that’s fantastic. Well, one of the reasons why we wanted to include you in this conversation is because so many churches at the Unstuck Church serves are using Rooted as part of their spiritual formation strategy. And for those who may not be familiar, will you give us kind of the backstory of Rooted? How did that even come about?
John:
Yeah, absolutely. So for us, really that journey began back in 2008, where we visited a church in Nairobi, Kenya called Mavuno. We had some relationship there and really that was birthed out of a learning desire on a part of our leadership team of “We want to get out of sight of just the Western context to see what God is doing globally across many different streams of the church, and particularly around discipleship.” And as we were there at Mavuno Church, we got just greatly encouraged by their team and discovered something that they were running there called Mizizi, which is Swahili for Rooted. And so a great relationship was born birthed out of that, and in partnership with Mavuno Church there in Nairobi, we undertook the project of a couple of years of adapting and contextualizing that to what has now become Rooted for our context and beyond. And so we first ran Rooted here at Mariners in 2010. That’s when we launched it here and have been running it three times a year for really the last part of 15 years now.
Tony:
Now. Any sense of how many people have gone through Rooted just at Mariners Church?
John:
Yeah, that’s a big number. I could tell you just across this last kind of ministry year, there’s been about 4,000 here, and we’re just talking to the span of the last year. And then that’s been a considerable growth over the last couple of years. So I couldn’t tell you all in all over the last 15 years here at Mariners. And of course, it’s just not also here at Mariners too, since 2010, in those first few years, we had about 35 other churches that were running Rooted, and now we serve about 2000 churches that consistently use Rooted as a foundational part of their discipleship pathway.
Tony:
Yeah, well, again, I’m not surprised because many of the churches that our team engages with are using Rooted as part of their strategy as well. So help us though, when at Mariners Church, how are you using Rooted and how does that integrate into your spiritual formation strategy? Because there are other components of your spiritual formation strategy as well, but Rooted, it sounds like it’s pretty instrumental in that.
John:
Absolutely. It is the driving kind of force behind how we think strategically about discipleship here at Mariners. So it is the way in which we build our life groups. So if someone comes to Mariners and they’re looking to get connected into a life group, we all start together at Rooted. And Rooted is that 10 week discipleship experience where you connect in with others, you’re building community, you’re being activated to serve in your gifts. And so it is really the starting place for anyone here at Mariners that is looking to grow or explore faith together. And everything that is learned within the Rooted experience, it fuels that group of community going forward, not only within their group, themselves, within their life group, but how they serve and contribute to the largest story that God is writing through the church.
Tony:
And it’s interesting because that Rooted actually combines a lot of things that I hear churches wrestling with, how do we help people that have questions about faith? How do we help new believers? How do we help people connect into community? And really Rooted is a foundation for all of that, isn’t it?
John:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think sometimes there’s a bit of a false dichotomy that we think that discipleship and evangelism are at two ends of the spectrum, when actually those things exist together. And so how we see God really using Rooted is both of those. And what we would say is one of the ways, the best ways to grow in your own faith, in your own formation is to be a part of helping someone else to discover who Jesus is and walk that experience in and through their life. And so certainly we see that we’re rooted as an environment for those that are equally exploring the Christian faith, but also for those that are looking for reengaging or catalytic experience for the discipleship to reengage faith in a new way, in a more vibrant way are able to do that.
And it’s a beautiful thing where we see that all the time. I mean, just the last group I led this last session, we had folks that had maybe been around church for quite a while and were looking to get reconnected in community, find deeper meaning and purpose in their faith, and folks that it was the very first thing that they’ve done at any church, anywhere are just brand new and exploring that together. And so it’s a great thing to see those as not like conflicting values, but actually that can happen in one great environment. And that’s part of what I think makes Rooted unique, is gathering around questions, but also this excitement to grow and connect in the church, connect in our purpose, and God does great things in both of those spaces together.
Tony:
So, and you’re kind of taking us down this path already, John, but what are you learning about how Rooted is helping people connect to faith and to the church?
John:
Yeah, I think it creates an environment where there’s conversation, right? So we’re bringing our questions, we’re bringing our shared learning, it’s creating an environment where it’s not just conversation, but there’s shared experiences. And so we want to bring people into an environment where we’re not just learning about information about the practice of Christianity, but we’re actually putting it into practice. That we’re learning to pray together. We’re learning to hear God’s voice together. We’re learning how to be in God’s word consistently. We’re learning how to serve together. And I think folks from either side, whatever spectrum that is, that’s what we want in every other area of life. We come into environments wanting to learn and to grow. And we know that the way that we learn and grow is not just by the transfer of information, but it’s actually by putting it into practice. And we do believe that the Christian faith is so compelling that whether you are again, re-energizing your faith or you’re discovering it for the first time, that as you put it into practice and you create these environments for God’s spirit to meet you and to move that he does an incredible faithful work. So it’s both in that environment of group conversations, practices and experiences that we see God do a good and gracious work.
Tony:
John, with that foundation, a little bit of backstory about Rooted, why do you think it’s so effective and why do you think it’s working so well within the context of Mariners Church and then the other churches that are engaging Rooted?
John:
Yeah, I think it’s that will worm quote comes to mind from Dallas Willard of, you know, if making disciples is the primary function of the church, that we should always be asking ourselves what’s our plan and is it working? And so there is a sense of, okay, we have a plan in place and we know that obviously God brings the fruit, he does the growth. He does that for sure, but he also, we co-labor with him. And so we want to be intentional and strategic about how we’re doing that. And so that’s why we have a thoughtful approach of introducing people to faith, of growing in their faith. And we try to make that as clear as possible. We often share the analogy of, I think Mariners we’ve grown and developed over the years and prior to Rooted, we probably would’ve been maybe more described as a full menu church, right?
Where those restaurants, you go to X number of restaurant and it’s got the full menu and you’re just like, man, what do I pick here? And we’re in Southern California and wanted to take our cues and move that approach to like In-N-Out Burger here in the left coast where we do a few things and we want to do those really, really well. And I think we serve our people really, really well when we have a simplified and accessible approach of how do I grow, how do I get connected, how do I find community? And that is an entry point for everyone that comes through. And I think simplifying that approach eliminates maybe the abundance of choice eliminates distractions, and it gives our team also a uniformed approach by which, like, we’re rallying for, we’re building into together we’re not competing, but actually we have a strategy at play that we believe is serving our people really well and faithfully.
Tony:
Alright. Alright, John, admit it though. In and out. It’s really overrated, isn’t it?
John:
Easy, easy.
Tony:
Alright, so we’re in a series on spiritual formation with a focus on encouraging people to serve others using their spiritual gifts. So what impact, if any, do you think Rooted might have on encouraging someone to serve and to engage in serving with the body of Christ?
John:
I love it. That’s a really great question. It’s the right question to be asking. ‘Cause I think there’s, there could be a temptation sometimes when we look at formation and discipleship where it could be almost too inward focus, where it’s about my growth, my journey, and there’s a good and right part of that for sure. But actually there’s always gotta be an outward expression of what God is doing inwardly and so in Rooted, you’re experiencing both of that. You’re learning how to read God’s word, you’re learning how to hear his voice, but you certainly are learning about how to serve others in the way that Jesus has served us, that we are most like Jesus when we are serving others. And so, during Rooted, two of the weeks are focused on how do I make the most of my life?
And we look at how do we serve the body of Christ with our gifts, kind of that intersection of our passion, our experiences, and our stories, and how do we use that to be activated to serve the church? How do we jump in and find ourselves in God’s story? But then also not just the body, but how do we serve the marginalized in our community with the love of Jesus? And again, we don’t just talk about it, we give them the active experience of doing that, about jumping on a serve and a ministry team during Rooted about serving alongside one of our local outreach partners where they get to learn the power of proximate service and relationships and jump into what God is doing. And we see it time and time again, so many Rooted groups as they end their 10 weeks, they jump in in an ongoing fashion to serve along that outreach opportunity. Many of those Rooted groups go on and serve individually, but also together through opportunities that are happening here at Mariners. And it’s a big thing for us, that we don’t want this just to be a 10 week exercise of learning some theological truths, but to be activated, to live it out, to be on mission, both serving the church and serving our wider community.
Tony:
So John, what are some of the strategies that you’re using at Mariners Church to really encourage people to engage in serving opportunities and to make sure that that is a part of your spiritual formation strategy?
John:
Yeah, so we kind of organize our strategy around something here at Mariners that we call the Transformational Loop. So that first stop is follow Jesus. And when I say, first off, actually people enter in at lots of different places, but follow Jesus. That’s where we look at our weekend services, introducing people to faith, and then we look at grow together and grow together is where Rooted and then our life groups that transition out of Rooted growing in community discipleship together. Second, the third stop serve one another, the activation of our gifts. And then change the world. And so everything that we do is with great intentionality to get people to take their next steps and journey through the Transformational Loop. And so Rooted for many is you get to learn all of those spaces within the context of Rooted, but it’s not certainly not the only space.
The teaching of God’s word, highlighting the joy and the opportunity of what it means to serve. Two times a year we do kind of formal volunteer expos, and then several more times a year there’s opportunities for people to jump in to serve into ministry teams because we’re also finding right finding community, we believe that comes principally through Rooted and through life groups. But also finding community through other shared missions and purposes through our serve teams is a great way for people to get connected. And so it’s a massive part of who we are. And we believe it’s best for people when they’re serving, when they’re finding purpose, and when they’re finding a community in that fashion. And so everything that we do is organized around having people connect with God, connect with the church, connect with their purpose, not being cul-de-sacs or silos and just learning things, but being active, being active in the story that God wants to write through them.
Tony:
John, what I’m hearing from a lot of other pastors and church leaders is encouraging people to serve others and to volunteer on teams inside and outside the walls of the church has just become more challenging for some reason after the pandemic and in recent years, they’re just trying to figure out kind of what are the shifts that we need to be making to encourage people to continue to serve using their spiritual gifts? I have to think at Mariners Church, this is even compounded by the fact that you kind of live in an area that’s very busy. People spend a lot of time on the highway system in your part of the country. And affluence too, I think might play a role in this where there’s kind of an expectation that churches can just hire staff to do ministry. Are you noticing some of these trends at Mariners? And if so, how are you trying to overcome them?
John:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think, if I’m honest, probably actually quite the opposite, that there is such an intentionality around serve culture here at Mariners that across all of our different ministries, our volunteer teams are growing. We organize ourselves in that way. When we look at our ministry plans, it’s a significant part of every single ministry that we mean it when we say that our number one job is Ephesians four, to equip the saints for the work of the ministry. That our primary job is giving ministry away. That we are not interested in hiring team here to do the work of the ministry that we want to thrive in being equippers, not because we think it makes us better at our job or looks good on some dashboard, but because that is the call, that is what we are called to do. As shepherds, that’s what we’re called to do. And so our team has such an intensity around that belief and our behaviors match that belief. And so I think it’s there’s a biblical mandate to it too, but also it’s a compelling thing. We don’t want to drag people in like we do actually believe, like, this is best for you. This isn’t about filling volunteer roles, like, we believe this is best for you when we say that we’re most like Jesus when we serve others, like we really believe that, that you become active in your faith and it becomes more your own and you’re more likely to share that with other people. And so, the serve culture here at Mariners, we’re always growing and learning and developing in that.
But it’s such a crucial point of our ministry strategy here. And we do see that growth across lots of different ministries. And again, that comes through thoughtful strategies through how we organize our teaching calendar, different entry points into volunteer teams, certainly during Rooted, one of my favorite things is at the Rooted celebrations. So Rooted is 10 weeks, the celebration at week 10, I get to stand and commission the Rooted groups as ministers of the gospel, pray over them as 90% of those Rooted groups transition to become ongoing life groups. And we talk right there. This is your next step. We’ve got volunteer serve cards and we’re all gonna do this. Every single one of us, we’ve already talked about spiritual gifts, we’ve already talked about the joy of serving.
And before we all leave, we’re all gonna indicate, man, what’s the team that I’m gonna jump in on? And we see many that take that, that next step immediately to not only gathering in their life group, which is a win, that that’s a win, but also to have an expression of what they experience by serving the church. And so there’s a lot of just enthusiasm for that here at Mariners. And our team lives and breathes that. And of course there could be a temptation with any church. It’s not really a size thing. This could be in any church where, you know what, let’s just hire, let’s think of a different way and a different strategy. But the church is at its best when it’s serving together, and we’re at our best when we’re equipping people to do that. And so we believe it’s best for them. It’s a win, win, win, right? It’s a win for them. It’s a win for others that they’re serving. And it’s a win for the kingdom.
Tony:
Alright, so let’s circle back. If a church is hearing your story about how you’re leveraging Rooted to engage the mission at Mariners and help people take their next steps towards Jesus, and they’re interested in figuring out, could Rooted be a part of our spiritual formation strategy as well, how would you suggest that that church gets started, John?
John:
Yeah, again, there are so many great different tools and resources out there, and there’s an abundance of that. But we would say with Rooted there is a uniqueness in that we don’t see this as just primarily a Bible study, although you are studying the Bible and Eric Geiger, senior pastor did a research book project based off of research that he did called Transformation Discipleship. And found what we found also to be true. The number one indicator of spiritual growth and development is being deeply rooted in God’s word. And so we study God’s word as a part of Rooted for sure. But it’s not just about study, right? It’s, as we talked about, it’s the other experiences, the rhythms of discipleship, praying together, breaking strongholds through confession.
It’s serving other people and it’s worship, it’s celebration, it’s all of these things. And so we’d love to have churches consider being a part of that. So yeah, we want to make it as easy as possible. So listeners can go straight to experiencerooted.com/unstuck, and that’s gonna take you to our Experience Rooted website where you’re gonna see more information about taking those next steps. And the first step is exploring it. So you’re doing that now you’re listening to this podcast, and you’ll see on our website that we host regular one hour webinars where people can learn more about implementing and discovering more about what Rooted is. You can download a free sample there. You can connect with our coaching team. So in addition to experiencerooted.com/unstuck, you can also just send us a direct email coaching@experiencerooted.com. And our team is so excited. We would love to hear the story of your church connect with you and talk about what it would look like to explore it and pilot it and then even launch it in your context.
Tony:
All right. With that, any final thoughts you’d like to share before we wrap up today’s conversation?
John:
Yeah, I think again, Rooted is not the Bible. It uses the Bible. We’ve seen God use it and bless it. But kind of going back to that quote of asking ourselves that first question of “what is our plan? Do we have a plan and is it working?” I mean, we want to be so faithful what God has entrusted us and across all the churches that we’re a part of and that we lead, every single one of us. So we don’t want to be a church that just grows in a wide fashion with more people that’s wonderful. But we also want to be churches that grow in depth. And so if this is a tool that you feel like would help your church to contribute in that fashion, then we would so love to talk about how do you implement this in and even create a discipleship strategy from Rooted. And so our team is ready to catch you and help you along the way.
Amy:
Well, man, Tony, that was a great conversation. I can see why so many churches have started using Rooted.
Tony:
Yeah, I loved what he shared about also the serving culture that they’ve developed at Mariners Church, and it comes from some of the work that they’re doing through Rooted. But John said this, this is so fun. The church is at its best when it’s serving together, and we’re at our best when we’re equipping people to do that. And I believe that too.
Amy:
That’s a great quote.
Tony:
I mean that really is the heart of what we’re trying to encourage is encourage churches to do, when they think about their full spiritual formation strategy, how important serving others is to spiritual formation. It was also good to learn more about Rooted specifically. And it’s very obvious, Rooted is a practical way to integrate discipleship through learning and community building and serving in a way that everybody feels more interconnected and clear about what their next steps need to look like. So if you want to learn more about Rooted, John shared that you can visit experiencerooted.com/unstuck to get started.
Amy:
This is great. Well, Tony, any final thoughts before we wrap up today’s conversation?
Tony:
Well, I just want to make sure that you have subscribed to our podcast show notes so you don’t miss any of the conversations and resources in this series on engaging volunteers as part of spiritual formation. And next week you’re gonna want to come back because we have a fantastic conversation with Pastor Chris Hodges. Chris, as you probably know, is the pastor of Church of the Highlands in Alabama. He’s going to be back to talk about growth track and how that’s used at Church of the Highlands to encourage people to take steps towards connection with the church, the body of Christ, and more specifically into serving opportunities. And you can sign up and get the show notes for all of the upcoming episodes at theunstuckgroup.com/podcast.
Sean:
Well, thanks for joining us on this week’s podcast at The Unstuck Group. Our goal is to help pastors grow healthy churches by guiding them to align vision, strategy, team, and action. In everything we do, our priority is to help churches help people meet and follow Jesus. If there’s any way we can serve you and your church today, reach out to us at theunstuckgroup.com. Next week we’re back with a brand new episode. So until then, have a great week.
