What to Do When the Bottom Falls Out

In this edition of the Lead On Podcast, Jeff Iorg, president of the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, discusses how to respond when a crisis hits a community or ministry context. He emphasizes the importance of intensifying communication during a crisis, providing frequent updates and spiritual guidance. He underlines that crises are inevitable in ministry and encourages leaders to be prepared to when they occur.

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Host

Jeff Iorg

President, SBC Executive Committee

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Jeff Iorg: 00:55

Welcome to the lead on podcast. This is Jeff Ords, the president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, welcoming you once again to our continuing conversation about practical issues related to ministry leadership. Today on the podcast, I wanna talk about what do you do when the bottom falls out? How do you respond when you have a crisis situation hit your community and your ministry context? Like, for example, we were in the Midwest early in our ministries, and we had a major flooding incident.

Jeff Iorg: 01:30

Many families in our church flooded. Our church building flooded. It was, water everywhere. Major crisis of leadership to get us through the flood situation. Today, I'm looking at a news story that there have been tornadoes in the Midwest.

Jeff Iorg: 01:50

One story said a 100 homes either damaged or destroyed. No doubt that community is today in a crisis situation. We've just lived through a couple of hurricanes that came through, the south and the southeast. Those communities have been, and in some cases, still are in crisis. So one kind of crisis situation that causes, as I put it, the bottom to fall out, is a natural disaster, flood, tornado, hurricane, or if you lived in the American West, where I lived for many years, fires, wildfires, forest fires, that's all in that same category.

Jeff Iorg: 02:29

But that's not the only kind of crisis situations that can hit you. Another one is, something that happens in the economy where you live. For example, an industry that your community depends on closes or decides to significantly alter its employment patterns, or even, not in a permanent way, but if, like, an industry shuts down because of a strike or some job action or some, material shortage or something like that. I lived through one of these in one of my pastoral context where, the company that provided the livelihood for a number of families in our church decided to go out on strike, and that had a significant impact on our ministry context. It had an immediate impact on the families that were on strike because of the economic loss.

Jeff Iorg: 03:21

It also had an impact on our church because of the economic lack of giving, but it also had an impact because not everyone in our community and not even everyone in our church was supportive of the strikers and of what they were standing for. And so it also impacted us in terms of the morale, the, ethos, or the the spirit, if you will, of who we were as a congregation. And then, of course, another kind of crisis is when you're facing a ministry crisis like I did when I was facing with faced with moving, Golden Gate Seminary to its new location and its new identity as Gateway Seminary. And so you're facing with this, crisis of circumstances that have been brought about in your ministry context where you're having to face up to issues and move people through, a prolonged period of difficulty in a ministry context. So whether it's a natural disaster event or whether it's an economic impact or whether it's some kind of ministry situation, or one more I I forgot to mention, and that is when you have a a negative event of some kind of catastrophic, thing happen in your community.

Jeff Iorg: 04:28

For example, again, this happened to me during pastoral ministry days. We had a school bus accident in which a number of children were killed and several were injured. And while, that may not have made the the national news in our community, this was a devastating, event. One that impacted not only the families on the bus, but the families that were in the schools, that their children knew the kids that were killed or injured, the churches that they attended, the just the relationships in the neighborhoods, you get the idea. But in a small town like we were, a major bus accident like this was very much a crisis situation which called for crisis leadership for me.

Jeff Iorg: 05:13

So these are some of the examples of what I'm talking about. But today on the podcast, I really wanna focus on what are some crisis leadership insights that you can remember to put into practice when you have one of these situations overwhelm you. Whether it's natural disaster or financial industry or the ministry impact, like moving the seminary or even a catastrophic situation, like a tragic accident or, people dying in large numbers.

Jeff Iorg: 05:40

What do you do? Well, here's some things to remember. Number 1, in a leadership crisis, you have to intensify your communication. Intensify your communication.

Jeff Iorg: 05:53

This means several things. 1st, it means that you provide frequent updates on what's happening and what your church or your ministry organization is doing about the situation. Frequent updates. Now you may say, well, yes, but I've put out that information, and I don't need to keep saying it over and over again. Oh, no.

Jeff Iorg: 06:14

Yes. You do. Remember, people in crisis process information poorly, and people in crisis are distracted by many other needs and demands and calls for their attention, and so they're not giving you their undivided attention on every word you're saying or every time you're speaking about a situation. So frequent operational updates means that you are giving information frequently and that you are giving that same information, perhaps even repeatedly, until you're convinced that it's truly communicated to your constituents. Frequent operational updates might mean something like a weekly or even, more often than that, short newsletter or short, email or short text, something that communicates, on a consistent and regular basis, the operational information needed to get through the crisis.

Jeff Iorg: 07:10

Now, another aspect of this might be even providing people with some kind of daily or weekly devotional or daily or weekly spiritual guidance to help them with the situation or moving through the situation. Now I did this, for example, when I moved to seminary. I knew that our community needed a spiritually centering point, something that we could come together around that would give us a sense of commonality of what we were learning and how we were growing and what we needed to do in order to address the situation. And so after I announced the seminary's relocating, I initiated and wrote for several months a weekly devotional called the Gateway Beatitudes, and I simply used words like be courageous, be helpful, be flexible, be patient. And I had a series of these, 1 a week, where I would take that little phrase, be something, and I would give a Bible verse about that, and I would usually write 2 short paragraphs about the Bible verse and about how that applied in our situation right now at the seminary, and then I would write up 1 or 2 sentence prayer that we could all be praying together that week based on that scripture verse and my short explanation.

Jeff Iorg: 08:25

Now when I started doing these, I I knew that they would they would provide some help, and I knew that they would provide us some centering point so that we could come together

Jeff Iorg: 08:36

with commonality around a verse and a thought and a prayer every week. I was blown away by the response. These took on a life of their own, and on those weeks where I was traveling or I got delayed or

Jeff Iorg: 08:53

I didn't get it out right at the moment, people would ask, is there gonna be a beatitude this week? And I would, of course, get it out as soon as I could to respond to that, but it reminded me of how important it is for people to have spiritual direction, spiritual commonality, and a spent sense of spiritual connection during a crisis moment in their lives. And I'm not saying that you have to write a daily or a weekly devotional every time you go through a crisis. Now remember, I'm giving you suggestions about different options that you can implement. My general principle here is you have to intensify communication.

Jeff Iorg: 09:27

So whatever you've been doing, if a crisis is taking place, your leadership response is going to include intensified communication, which might mean frequent operational updates, meaning that you send out email or post on your website or text to people, or in some cases, hand out a piece of paper with a update on it about what's happening. But it also could involve these daily devotionals or weekly devotionals that I'm describing. Another way to intensify communications is to do so in public gatherings. Now if you're in a church context, you have church services. If you're in a organizational context, you may have weekly or monthly staff meetings.

Jeff Iorg: 10:02

And if you were like

Jeff Iorg: 10:03

I was in a seminary context, you had chapel, which meant that I had a weekly opportunity to speak to the community about the crisis we were living through and to underscore, to, information, to give out additional information, to call attention to the thoughts

Jeff Iorg: 10:21

that I was expressing in these devotional guides, and other things like that. So

Jeff Iorg: 10:27

when you're thinking about the public aspects of your communication, think in terms of planning specifically and intentionally what you wanna say in those contexts. Now, this may mean that you're going to have to plan some services that really do look differently than what you might do in a routine or ordinary time. So, for example, during a time of crisis in a ministry context, there may be some need for more open mic opportunity for people to come and express what, God is working in their lives or the fears they're experiencing or the concerns they have or the prayer requests they need to present. There may be a time for more small group prayer or for more public calls to prayer or more opportunities to prayer. There may be a time for more people to participate in the service by having more people participate in scripture reading or having more responsive readings or more times when people are able to engage the Bible in different and more personal ways.

Jeff Iorg: 11:26

What I'm saying is that in a typical worship service, there's singing and praying and preaching and response. Not anything wrong with doing those things. But in a crisis moment, you may need to do some additional things in the in terms of communication that help people to process what's happening to them and to feel that they're being ministered to in that moment. So the first step in crisis leadership is intensify communication.

Jeff Iorg: 11:55

2nd, purposeful decision making. Now, I

Jeff Iorg: 12:00

wanna talk about purposeful decision making in 2 big buckets or 2 broad categories now. First is what I call triage, and second is what I call treatment. Now I'm kind of borrowing these words in the medical community, but I may be not using them exactly as they would. Triage is that immediate care that you provide a person where you're actually making an initial diagnosis of what they need to survive. Treatment is that longer term, longer range plan that you have for someone.

Jeff Iorg: 12:32

So if a patient is presented to you and they're bleeding openly, the immediate need, is

Jeff Iorg: 12:39

is not to put a

Jeff Iorg: 12:41

band aid on a scratch somewhere. The immediate need is to stop the bleeding, and you're gonna stop that bleeding immediately, and you're gonna cast aside every other thing that has to be done in order to get that done. Now, after you get that done, the person gets stabilized, then you can talk about, let's clean up the rest of the wounds, let's repair and damage and bandage other places, and maybe even let's go back and do some cosmetic surgery or some cosmetic repair of that first triage moment to be sure that we get the right treatment done over time. So triage is different than treatment. Triage is what you've got to do right now to stop the bleeding.

Jeff Iorg: 13:16

Treatment is what you're gonna do over a longer period of time to really restore fully a person to functionality or to whatever ministry need needs to be accomplished. So purposeful decision make making means that as a leader in a crisis situation, you diagnose what is needed right now to triage this moment. What are the initial decisions that have

Jeff Iorg: 13:40

to be made? So, for example, when I was dealing with that bus accident, I knew that the most important thing that had

Jeff Iorg: 13:50

to happen immediately was I had to go to those families that were impacted, be physically present with them, listen to their stories, help them process their initial anger and other aspects of their grief, and triage them in the moment. I knew that later, there was going to need to be service planning to help them plan memorial services, and there was going to need to be community moments where we could come together in symbolic and meaningful ways to memorialize those who'd passed away and to, and to deal with the trauma of this mass, casualty event. And I also knew that treatment was going to involve longer term counseling going forward with people to help them process what happened, including spiritual direction to answer the god questions about the moment and what had occurred. So there was triage needed in the moment. There was treatment needed over time.

Jeff Iorg: 14:43

Same thing that happened in the flood situation I referenced earlier or happens in a natural disaster situation. Triage is what needs to happen today. Well, what needs to happen today is this person needs food. They need clothing. They need shelter.

Jeff Iorg: 14:59

They need spiritual support, emotional support. They may need immediate assistance to contact a family member or to communicate with loved ones. These are the triage moments that a person has, for example, in a natural disaster. But what are the treatment options? Well, the treatment options are, well, tomorrow or the next day or the next day, we gotta get somebody over here with some chainsaws and dump trucks.

Jeff Iorg: 15:22

We gotta start cutting up and cleaning up and helping a person sort out and restore some sense of normalcy to life. So treatment may take weeks to to accomplish. Triage usually takes maybe, hours or even days. But purposeful decision making is you as a leader knowing the difference between these two kinds of decisions and recognizing that what's needed in the first moments is triage, stabilizing the situation, stabilizing the person, meeting their immediate and most pressing needs. That's not the day to start long term counseling.

Jeff Iorg: 15:58

That's not the day to start sorting out, who was at fault and who was wrong and who needed to do something differently. That's not the day to start the debates about insurance or about legal responsibilities or anything like that. No. Triage is about the immediacy of the moment and you having the wisdom to recognize some things need to wait, but some things can't, and I need to focus right now on getting the the people that are impacted through the moment. And then and then I'm gonna come back and talk about now what needs to happen for treatment.

Jeff Iorg: 16:30

What needs to take place over the next days, weeks, or months, to get us to the point where this person has come through this crisis? Now you might be asking, well, how how do you know the difference the different timetable that's involved here? In other words, how long do you triage, and then how long do you before you start treatment, and then once you start treatment, how long does that take? These are not quantifiable, issues. I can't tell you that triage takes an hour or a day or 3 days.

Jeff Iorg: 17:00

I can simply tell you that it requires your full attention to help a person to come to stability, and whatever that means is what you have to do to triage the moment. And the same thing on treatment. How long it will take to help a person process to the point where they're able to move forward based on what's happened to them is going to be an art, not a science in terms of discerning what that requires from you in ministry. So in a crisis situation, number 1, we wanna intensify communication. Number 2, practice purposeful decision making, recognizing that triage and treatment are not the same thing.

Jeff Iorg: 17:36

Triage needs to come first, treatment then comes later, and you have the wisdom to know how to decide what needs to be done right now and make that the focus of your initial response. Okay. A third thing to remember is to to take initiative to do ministry and to provide ministry in creative ways. Now, when a crisis happens, it is often very disruptive. It's disruptive to communities.

Jeff Iorg: 18:05

It's disruptive to schedules. It's disruptive to buildings. It's disruptive to, available resources. Everything is disrupted, and so it's tempting to just say, well, everything we know has been disrupted, and so, therefore, we just can't do anything. We we just have to stop.

Jeff Iorg: 18:23

And when things get back to normal or when this crisis is over, then we'll step in and start trying to recover and rebuild and start a ministry again.

Jeff Iorg: 18:31

Oh, no. No. No. No. When crisis happens, you have

Jeff Iorg: 18:36

to take the initiative to continue your ministry, but perhaps in ways that you've never done before or in ways that are very different than the situation as you were encountering it. Let me just give you a couple of examples. When COVID happened, I was a member of a relatively large church, about 800 attendants in California. It was a predominantly African American church, as many of you know, and because of that, it really thrived on community. Now I know all churches thrive on community, but in this particular African American church, a community was one of the highest, if not the highest value.

Jeff Iorg: 19:14

And so when COVID happened and there was a complete shutdown of churches capacity to gather, it was very hard on this church. And so the pastor immediately immediately, started looking for creative ways to continue the ministry and to get people together in some capacity. Now it was Southern California. Being outside for worship services was definitely an option, and that was one of the options that was proposed by governmental leaders and given approvals by, people that were involved in that decision making at that time. And so very quickly, our pastor announced that we were building a stage on our parking lot and that, within and the following Sunday, we would resume in person worship services outdoors

Jeff Iorg: 20:06

with social distancing, and I thought,

Jeff Iorg: 20:09

what will that look like? Well, we arrived on Sunday and there was a stage on the parking lot and there were hundreds of chairs in the parking lot and those chairs were in groups of 2 and 4, and they were all about 6 feet apart, scattered around all over the parking lot, and as people were arriving, there were ushers with masks on saying, you can move chairs if you need to, but please keep the social distancing in place. In other words, if you're a family of 5, go and borrow a chair from some other group, but let's keep the social distancing if we can. And so they had set up the chairs in twos and fours and given people permission

Jeff Iorg: 20:52

to move chairs to accommodate their families. And the pastor stepped up

Jeff Iorg: 20:56

on the stage and gave some additional direction, and then, they had music. But instead of a full choir and all the music that we normally had, there were just 4 people on the stage all socially distancing saying, let's stand together, and let's sing together. And we did this outdoors, and within within a very short period of time, we were back worshiping in person on the parking lot.

Jeff Iorg: 21:18

Now, was it the same?

Jeff Iorg: 21:20

No. But it was very meaningful because people realized that this is as much community as we're going to be able to have right now, but it's better than many churches are having right now, and it gives us a sense of connection that we weren't getting any other way. Thank God for a pastor who had this kind of vision to very quickly, in this crisis moment, take the initiative to move ministry in a very creative fashion. Now you may say, well, we couldn't do that outdoors where we are in Canada or in Minnesota or something like that. Didn't even wouldn't even work for us down on the Gulf Coast where it's too hot and too humid.

Jeff Iorg: 21:55

I get all that. I'm not

Jeff Iorg: 21:56

saying you should have done what we did. I'm just telling you that this pastor, in the midst of a crisis, demonstrated initiative to continue ministry in a creative way. Rather than saying, oh my gosh. The crisis is here. There's nothing we can do.

Jeff Iorg: 22:11

We we can't meet in our building, we can't get that close to each other and and have community, so therefore, we just need to stop everything.

Jeff Iorg: 22:18

No. He said, no. No. No. No.

Jeff Iorg: 22:20

What can we do? Well, we can be outside. Well, we got a big parking lot. Well, let's find a way to use it. And so, in very creative ways, they solved this issue.

Jeff Iorg: 22:31

I'm simply saying that when crisis happens and everything is disrupted, your responsibility as

Jeff Iorg: 22:38

a ministry leader is to take the initiative to continue the ministry in whatever creative way is necessary to get the job done. Another thing in that particular church, because it of the culture of the church and because of its history, the ministers of our church usually dressed pretty nicely on Sundays. They all wore suits and all of that, even in Southern Southern California, and that was fairly normal. And a lot of the deacons and other men in the church came dressed the same way, but when we moved outdoors, the pastor came in a pullover golf shirt type, polo shirt, and nobody seemed to care. And, frankly, it was something he had been wanting to do for a long time, which was sort of change the dress code a bit, so that people that were coming, that were visitors, that were not Christians, that were from the community might feel a little more comfortable, and this creative moment of moving to the parking lot enabled him to do something else in the moment that he'd never been able to do before, which was change the dress code, and it changed the entire feeling.

Jeff Iorg: 23:38

And once the church moved back into its building a few months later, they retained that as a positive outcome of the creative approach they took to ministry while they were outdoors. So we're gonna intensify communication, make purposeful decisions, take initiative to be creative. And then finally, when you're in a crisis situation, don't miss the opportunity to do what I call lose the barnacles. You know, every ministry organization, every church collects what I call barnacles, and that's things that just get stuck on us because of tradition, because of habit, because of convenience that really aren't that helpful, or that effective, or that essential. And so when you're in a crisis moment and you're having to make a response, and you're having to strip your ministry operation down to its core essentials that accomplish the mission, you're gonna lose some barnacles

Jeff Iorg: 24:35

and use this as an opportunity to lose them forever.

Jeff Iorg: 24:41

Now how does this work? Well, when you're in a crisis situation, it means that you must have a sharper focus

Jeff Iorg: 24:46

on your mission, on what really matters. Like in that illustration I just gave, the pastor knew that what really matters

Jeff Iorg: 24:56

is that people have a sense of coming together in the most community oriented form possible

Jeff Iorg: 25:03

for worship. Didn't really matter that

Jeff Iorg: 25:05

they were in a building. Didn't really matter what people wore. Didn't really matter if they got to sit really close to each other. It just mattered that they could be as close to each other as possible in that context. The focus of the mission was, let's be the church and bring the church together to continue its ministry.

Jeff Iorg: 25:25

And all the things that we normally think are essential, like ushers and, like, offering plates and, like, dress codes and, like, orders of worship and, like, being indoors where it's air conditioned, all that stuff was put aside. All of those barnacles were cast aside, and we got to the core of what we're really all about.

Jeff Iorg: 25:48

Now, this helped us to eliminate or redefine many functions. For example,

Jeff Iorg: 25:55

we liked having a full choir, or we liked having a more, technology driven worship, but we didn't have to have either of those things. We could sing simple songs with simple leadership with 1 or 2 instruments accompanying, and still accomplish the focus of community and mission and worship together. So by eliminating or redefining functions, we were able to recognize really was at the core of what we were trying to do and to preserve that core. Now when you lose the barnacles,

Jeff Iorg: 26:27

lose them forever. You don't have to ever go back to the old normal.

Jeff Iorg: 26:32

You can use what happens during a crisis to spur you to new areas of ministry, new ways of doing things, new approaches. For example, in a context of a crisis, as I mentioned earlier, you may have a natural disaster where you have to pioneer some new ways of doing benevolence ministry in your church. But when those are over, you may be able to say, you know, we learned some things here about how to connect with our community, how to resource people more directly, how to preserve, store, and distribute, material that people need. Let's keep that going. We don't have to go back to the old way of doing things.

Jeff Iorg: 27:11

Now we've learned a new normal of how to respond to our community.

Jeff Iorg: 27:14

Let's keep that going and be ready to keep doing that as we go into the future. And remember that when you go through

Jeff Iorg: 27:21

one of these crisis situations, it's gonna be a learning experience, not only for you, but for everyone else who's involved with you. And make it a learning experience where people be are able to experience new things, maybe things they wouldn't have even tried in a normal ministry context. But by learning those new things, they can see new approaches, new ways of doing things, and they may even be able to say to you, hey, pastor. Hey, president. Hey.

Jeff Iorg: 27:44

Have you thought about doing it this way going forward because this has been so effective and meaningful right now? One of the ways I saw this again during the pandemic was the number of churches that initiated online delivery of their worship services or of other aspects of their ministry. Now I also believe that that online will never replace, a live experience of gathering together and worshiping and hearing the word of God and praying and experiencing all of that together. I get that. But the hard reality is there are people who can't do that every week in every church.

Jeff Iorg: 28:19

There are people who have sick children, people who have to travel for work, people who have alternative work schedules that they can't, that they can't adjust, people who have caregivers for elderly parents, all kinds of reasons why people can't participate every week in a church gathering. And they wanna stay connected to their church, and so they can now log in and participate Virtually, I won't say every church, but huge numbers of churches are now doing this, not asking it to replace church, but asking it to augment the connection people have with their church family. That's just one way that a crisis situation opened people to a new way of doing things, which was preserved after the crisis was abated, and now is a part of an ongoing healthier ministry model. Well, today, the podcast has been about what do you do when the bottom falls out? When you have a natural disaster, a financial or industry crisis in your community, when you have a ministry challenge, like moving a seminary, or even a hard, difficult, catastrophic situation, like a mass casualty experience, like a school bus accident or something like that.

Jeff Iorg: 29:29

What do you do? Intensify communication, make purposeful decision making, take initiative to do ministry in creative ways and lose the barnacles. Let the challenge of the crisis strip away things that aren't really that essential, enable you to do things you might not have ever risked doing before, and learn new ways of doing things that you're going to preserve as you go forward after the crisis. It is inevitable if you are a ministry leader, sooner or later, you will face a crisis in your ministry context. Be prepared to offer leadership in that crisis.

Jeff Iorg: 30:09

Be prepared to do the things we've talked about today, so that you can have in that moment an effective time of growth and progress and accomplishment of God's mission. Crises will come. Be ready. Of God's mission. Crises will come.

Jeff Iorg: 30:21

Be ready as you lead on.