 So looking at Ruth, I'm going to open up to Ruth 1. I just want to skip down. This is where Ruth is choosing to be with her mother-in-law Naomi. And so in verse 1, 16, we read here to you guys. This is as Naomi was asking them to basically leave. It says, but Ruth said, do not urge me to leave you or should return them from following you. For where you go, I will go, and where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God. Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried. May the Lord do so to me, and more also, if anything, but death parts be from you. And when Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said, no more. I want to point that out because I feel like this shows loyalty in servant leadership. Loyalty to your pastor, potentially loyalty to your team that you're on where God has placed you in the season, but it's also a loyalty where Ruth is saying here, I am loyal to your God. And so again, thinking about being flexible and hosting. Remember, we're hosting and creating a space of hospitality for God first, your God will be my God, says Ruth. And then for the people that God's placed over us in leadership, like Naomi is over Ruth here. And I think that's beautiful because Naomi or Ruth, excuse me, is just like, OK, I'll do it. Let's do it. Where are you going? I'm going to go. I feel like God has placed me in your family regardless of what happened to my husband. I'm going to go. And so that spirit of I'm going to do what you say as my leader with the submission to what God is asking me to do, that that is step one. And when you do that in a certain leadership role, people start to notice. So in this here, if we look over at verse chapter two, she's going to go out to the field. So this is another amazing point about Ruth that I just love. If you look at verse two, one through two, I'll read that real quick. Now, Naomi had a relative of her husband. He's a worthy man of the clan of Lemolek, whose name was Boas. And Ruth the Moabite said to Naomi, so this is Ruth noticing something. Ruth says to Naomi, let me go to the field and lean among the ears of grain after him and whose site I shall find favor. Naomi didn't ask that. Ruth saw the potential. Ruth saw the need, identified it, and acted. A huge part of creating the space of hospitality is owning it. Whatever your role is, whether you're on volunteer team, whether you're serving on staff, whether you are just trying to serve your pastor in some fashion, looking for the need before it's verbalized. It's a skill. It's something you can grow in. But it's a way of being aware of their needs before they need it and just having it there for them. If that is me to take up space in their mind, on a weekend application, you're like, I'm not going to even meet. I'm not on the facilities team. We have a great facilities team. But I see that trash can go empty it. You don't have to call our facilities team. They're busy keeping this place running. As a servant leader in creating space for hospitality, if you see a need, identify it and own it. When you have a heart for hospitality, it's more than, here's a new book. I'm so glad you visited it, which is great. But it's more than that. And it's a measure of just owning every part of the building, owning every part of the ministry that you can serve and that you can create an environment, again, for God and for the people that he's bringing here. Just like Ruth, she saw that and she said, oh, I'm going to actually go do this. Let's see what happens when I go to the field. That now we do, excuse me, that now we do the disaster to do. And so once she does this, in the scriptures, we see that Boaz and some people notice her and apologize. So when she's out there, Boaz notices her. And I feel like that just speaks to the reality that when you're serving, when you're looking for what God wants you to do in an arena, when you're looking for what he can make us better, when you're looking for how you can welcome people into the space that you're in, people talk about it in a good way. The leaders are going to start noticing, maybe you're a volunteer and they might find a team lead position for you because you are, you're showing signs of ownership of this place because God put it on your heart, before even a leader put it on your heart. Because again, we're here to host God, we're here to show that loyalty and faithfulness to God above all else and that starts to show and people see it and it can be an opportunity for growth. As you go down in Ruth's story, we see that in verse, I won't read it, but in chapter three, verse one through five, Naomi is basically talking to Ruth about, hey, I see this opportunity with Boaz and she gives her a list of like, I want you to prepare, I want you to go here, I want you to make contact with him. And I feel like this is a good example of something I know I've felt in ministry with our ministry team that there's tension sometimes. Maybe I'm happy and cozy in my meeting space and I don't want to go do this new thing that you're asking me to do, Krista or Pastor Rick or whoever it might be. But as Ruth shows here, she listens to her leadership and it's still under the submission of God and she doesn't, there's a tension there but she walks in what is being asked of her in that certain leadership. She doesn't talk back, she just prepares and she goes. And when she does that, this is when you start to see throughout the rest of the book of Ruth that literally it leads to Boaz going to leaders in the city to talk about how he can be a redeemer and the transaction that happens there but leaders talk about it, they see your heart and God will help you flourish in those positions when you are humbling yourself in that way. And at the end of all of this, in regards to Ruth, she marries, oh, excuse me, marries Boaz, great, awesome, but at the very end, she is the mother Obed who is the grandfather of David in the lineage of Christ. You don't know the seeds that your quiet faithfulness and certain leadership will grow to become. You don't know, you don't know how listening to your leaders will develop this fruit in the lineage of Christ. She had no idea that's what was happening. She was being faithful, she was listening, she was identifying needs and now she's in scripture as a great, great, great grandmother of Jesus. Like you don't know what's at the end of your faith. So keep that in mind. When it comes to hospitality, every intentional snack that you put out, every handwritten note of things and every name that you remember after a weekend is a seed that God sees and that the people who you're interacting with are seed. So I wanna encourage you guys, whatever your role is, that those are seeds that can be intentionally planted and they aren't wasteful. Being intentional about the coffee that you buy for your pastor is thoughtful. Being intentional about the thank you notes for the volunteers who came in to serve for a full day for free is going to change hearts. And you might not know that at the time, but it is impactful. So to swing a little bit into a few practical tips, while we have a little bit of time here, I wanna make sure we're doing all right. A couple things along with flexibility that I wanna point out that I feel like these scriptures speak to in Ruth as well as just things to be aware of when you're looking at how to create space for hospitality, both for the Lord and for the people that he's placed in your ministry is communication. Has anyone ever heard of Basecamp? Anyone who knows him will laugh. Anyway, Basecamp for me is like my love language. It's a project management system. We use it a lot here for event planning. I don't show you a little bit of that if we have time. But regardless of how you communicate, when you are planning an event, when you are creating a space for a guest speaker to come in and when you're preparing for your weekend ministry, communicate and say it clearly and say it 300 times. I appreciate that and I know that every person on our team is not wired that way. They're not supposed to be wired that way, but I am and so it's my strength. And so I've been placed here, forgot to help, for me to help create a room for hospitality and for certain leadership here. And so part of that is helping communicate. So even this conference is a great example of that. We're working on the changes that are happening. Great, Dr. Michael Brown, Master Lee, the ministry that's happening in session, awesome. Okay, well what are we gonna do? Let's get with our team, communicate about when this workshop is starting, when the next ones are starting and then tell everyone 100 times what was decided. So wherever you are in ministry, remember that one of the best ways to love someone is to speak clearly and truthfully to them. I listened to a Craig Rochelle, he has a leadership podcast and he did one with Dave Ramsey. And Dave Ramsey said, I don't have a quote, it just came to mind, but Dave Ramsey literally said something along the lines of like clear communication is loving communication. Because if you're meeting around the bush and if you're trying to like kind of cover something up or you're not just telling it straight, like you're taking up someone's time and you are potentially gonna have to re-communicate this and that trickles down. If I have to communicate a change to Pastor Sean and our production team, I don't wanna be like, well, I don't know, what should we do, we could move the workshop, we could cancel, what should we do? I'm gonna say, what works for you? He tells me what works. I say, yeah, okay, we're gonna work, this is the decision, we are going to continue our workshops, they're gonna end at the same time, we'll keep the rest of the afternoon flowing and then clear cut community of that down line. So even in regards to communicating to guests that you have coming in and even in mind of communicating to our congregation what we have happening at church, is we're all busy, the churches are busy doing amazing things, but we wanna be clearly communicating to our people. And one thing we do here at Radiant, when we plan out our entire calendar year, try, we lock in our calendar, just never really lock in it and you all know that, but we try to lock in our calendar of like what events we have coming up and then we publish that thing. We're like, here's staff, here is everything we're doing January to December in theory. If anything changes or isn't on here, it's a conversation that has to happen, we can't just say, hey, let's go do this because we have this planned out, we have our seasons and what we know we're focusing on in January, we have our C21 days, which is awesome and it takes a lot of work from a lot of our teams so we don't wanna do a whole lot else in that window. In May, we have this thing called the Rise Shine, it keeps us busy. The summer is a slow time, we say, but not really. This August, we get to have a prophetic presbytery. I think we're having Pastor Wayne drain back on some of the team members and that's a lot to coordinate so our summer is really a lot focused on that. The fall kicks off and we go seek 10 days along with a couple other events like True North. So we have this calendar year and even for me to serve our ministry teams and to serve our church, we're gonna make it clear what's coming up. If there's changes, we are communiting that a million times to everyone involved and we are just trying to be available to what God might change and that's not that we're putting rigid lines on that, that flexibility part, but for what we know, we're gonna communicate it and make it clear. Then flexibility, we touched on a lot and I literally wrote down this conference, Jackie Krista, so lots of things have been flexible for this event. Another one touching on the ownership and humility part out of, I wrote down Philippians, I believe Philippians. A two, three, where it says, do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but humility count others more significant than yourselves. On the conversation of owning every part, I am not above helping facilities. I'm not above serving in kids. By any means, I am shoulder to shoulder with every person on staff or serving this ministry because that's what God has asked me to do. And keeping that in mind, again, whether it's weekend service event, getting ready for a guest to come into your space, you have to be willing to do it all and that's okay. Because if your heart and your role is such that you are part of the servant leadership, you're an admin, your coordinator, maybe your assistant pastor, volunteer, whatever the role is, you have to own it and know that you're not above anything. And that's great. Because again, that goes back to what we saw in Ruth, where Ruth had been through some stuff. She, her husband died and she had left her hometown to be with her new family. And now she's like, okay, what do I do? Well, she decided to stay with her in this example I'm drawing as her leader, her oversight, her authority, and do what was needed. And she decided to go to a field and to glean some wheat. Okay, like maybe her job at home was like cooking up some awesome lunches, but she's like, all right, I'll do it. Let's go do this. I see this need, I'm gonna do it. I have to be willing to take the step to identify that need that we're talking about earlier and own it. But when we do that, you don't go around talking about it either because that's not very humble. This doesn't count because I'm up here sharing with you guys. I might go down in history being recorded and everything, maybe my pastor will see it. But, all that aside, the reality of owning it but then being humble about it because it doesn't matter who took out that trash. What matters is that the trash was taken out so that the next guest who walked by had space to stick their coffee cup in and that we didn't spill coffee on the floor that could potentially make someone slip, like the whole domino of what your small seeds of intentionality are doing. Again, you don't even know where they're leading. You don't know that that frustrated single mom who finally dragged her toddler to church that weekend just wanted her coffee but it got cold because her toddler was being crazy, she didn't get to drink it, she goes to throw it away and it falls out of the trash can and like how ticked off would you be? I have a toddler and that would just be like, all right, I'm done, this day is done. But just keeping that trash empty would avoid that hopefully for that mom. So remembering that and remembering from the scripture that you're not doing this for yourself, you're not doing it with selfish ambition but you're counting everyone above you and that's a way to open the door for yourself to serve, have certain leadership present in your life. Another thing that I'll touch on and then I'll leave a couple of minutes for questions is spirit led. So at Radiant we have created what we call the radiant way. It's kind of a living, breathing thing that is still kind of developing and the staff is starting to talk about it Pastor Ben and Pastor Rick and our lead team really put this together but what we say is we are as radiant, we are spirit led, simple and scalable and that can be applied to nearly, it should be applied to every area of ministry. Being a person who is looking to create a space for hospitality or to allow for certain leadership you gotta do things in as simple a way as possible and you have to understand for growth it has to be scalable. So one of the things we're recognizing is even down to our ministry processes we need them to be something that work. Call it like if we have a new visitor coming in they fill out a card, what happens next? We want to have a plan for where that information goes, what system it goes into, who touches it so that if God provides an open door for a radiant church, Opsigo, in our area we can basically say, hey, Opsigo team, here you go this is how we do it, this is the radiant way and you can take this and you can create a space for God in the Opsigo community to show up and so keeping it spirit led which I couldn't go on about but I feel like even hopefully our experience this week so far has shown what some of that looks like allowing God to do what he needs to do and praying about the small decisions and the big decisions and listening. Even with this workshop I wasn't supposed to be the main one leading it but then when Christo was able to be here the fun thing to touch on I hadn't read through all of her notes we had to like talk about what we were going to talk about we were working on it, she had added some and when I was preparing when she wasn't coming I was like, okay God like who's the person that I want to talk about that's a good example of servant leadership and he put Ruth on my heart I was like, okay well I'm gonna go back through Christo's notes and make sure I have my stuff all organized and she had added some scriptures from Ruth that I had never saw so I was like, okay God's got something in mind so hopefully this will touch someone but so even that I was like, okay that like gave me you know I'm headed the right direction I feel like this will land for someone because I'm gonna pray about this this is more than we have here with the microphone I'm up here to take some of your guys' time which I don't take lightly and I want it to be something that God wants to say so we're praying about it we want it to be spirit led as part of the radiant way and so even being spirit led on your weekends is because you want people to feel cared for and that obviously carries over to our guests when we have guests that come in like for this conference or even just a weekend guest speaker we are trying to take care of them to the best of our ability and that doesn't have to equal a big budget I don't want anyone to hear that I know that resources are different all across the board but it is just the thoughtfulness and it's the time and it's the sincerity that will create a space for your guest speakers when they come in one thing that I know Christa likes to mention so I'll help throw it out there for her is she literally like stalks their Instagram before they come and so she they come into this house and she's like, oh yes, this makes me so sad that Jackie was able to come on a couple occasions but for a couple reasons but man the gift that Christa put to Jackie was like a personal shopper did it for her she picked out some of our merch from here that we were gonna give to Jackie that is like totally on her brand and like her colors that we've seen her wear on Instagram and like just being that intentional about how you're welcoming in your guests will show because when they come in and they see your favorite coffee in there they see my favorite color t-shirt even though they've never seen your merch before whatever it might be the thought that goes into that is a seed that is going to be planted even for their time with you because they're gonna come in and feel cared for and like ready to go into whatever it is that they're here for they're not gonna come in and be like, oh I need water I was having some coffee I'm hungry, I just got off the plane I just wanna drink a little of our like you have that ready for them and you're already creating this hospitable space for them that they can just walk into and do what God has for them to do so I'm racing through it but I am on the last page here and I just wanted to reiterate that if we're talking about hospitality and certain leadership whether it's your first impressions team whether it's again ministry you're hosting your staff you're hosting your pastor whatever that looks like you want the practices, processes and all the elements of your hospitality to be scalable because God isn't doing this just for you He's not doing this just for your congregation probably nine times out of 10 the people you are touching with all of these intentional steps maybe they're gonna go plan a church maybe they are learning how to disciple their family and they're receiving a little bit of that from how you are hosting them so that they can go home and they have the energy to even do it so I just want to remind you guys of that and that kind of wraps up my notes I want to open it up for some Q&A if you guys have questions I have a couple things I can show you but I don't want this to take up time with that and see if you guys have direct questions that I can speak to and I'll go over these if not and I know we have some people online so let me know if you hear any questions over there but do you guys have questions? Okay, well, yes Did I walk the line of adopting too much? For guests or? Yes, you're gonna be fine Yes, thank you So the question is how do we walk the line between enough and not too much? Not too much because sometimes people feel overwhelmed Sure So how do we walk the line between enough and too much? We don't want to overwhelm and we don't want to skimp, we'll say It is a fine line I think a lot of it can be if you again look at it from a personal relational hosting like connecting with your guests who's coming less if that's where you can put your resources do that because that will be easier to gauge if you're not going to overwhelm them when you're verbally being available you're saying here's your space you're figuring out the schedule when they come so they know when they have downtime they know if they need to get away what that looks like and you're not forcing a host to stay with them all the time like you're asking them their preferences so that you have a gauge on that ahead of time in one of the ways you can, I'll ask you if I actually answer your question here but one of the ways we do that here is we literally have a guest speaker form that we build out and we send to any guest that's going to join us and this asks we do a lot of Instagram stalking but this answers a lot of the questions so literally Krista or myself or whoever's working on getting our guests here will send this to their admin or to the guest directly and it's going to ask about their travel plans it's going to ask if they want a rental car or if they're going to drive if they need something to pick them up we're letting them tell us what they want and that informs a lot of what we then do to try to make them comfortable because that kind of puts some boundaries on it for us if they're like I want to hang out with my host the whole time well then we're going to pick a host that's great and chatty and is up for like taking them to dinner but if they're like yeah just pick me up once time for service then we're going to make sure their hotel's booked ahead of time that we have a guest basket there and we're going to give them the space so that they can get there to settle and usually you get a lot of that from this and I know Danielle has this for online but if you guys want to let me know if this is something you'd be interested in looking at I think it's a sense of this really helps us to understand what they want out of us does that help you? Any other questions? Do you even see me hit on one of the things I had ready to go? Yes. Do you have a current so let me get back with us so that way when we get home we can call you guys and maybe have this and that stuff? I do have it with me because that's how prepared I am No, literally my email I would love for all of you guys to email me is C-Pherson so my name is on the workshop list C-Pherson at Radiant Doc Church so please email me, sorry I don't have my card on me he was asking me if I was waiting in touch so I didn't send you guys some resources if you have questions after this please email me I'd love to expand on anything that I shared or if you have other questions, yeah. Yes. What does reconciliation look like when there's not been clear communication or there's been miscommunication? What does that look like? Like do you think I'm like an event leveler you're asking or just cross the board? So the question is what does reconciliation look like when there's been miscommunication? And that definitely happens. And honestly it's a tension I feel like this goes back to what I referenced with how I was picturing Ruth in the moment of she's doing her job and then Naomi's like can you go do this? You're like oh but I have all these other plans. I feel that tension a lot and we have it happen here so I would say at Radiant we try to even follow the example in Matthew of the communication reconciliation of if there's an individual staff member that I feel like dropped it or comes to me and says if you dropped it I'm gonna have that direct conversation with this person. So if it's an individual I would say we go to them and say hey I feel like we're not hearing each other. I feel like everything I have done to prepare you didn't see this. Like you made this change and I wanna be flexible to honor what you're saying needs to happen but you're saying it's a small change to update the website or whatever it is. And it might truly just be because they don't know they don't know the work that goes on over here because they don't have to because that's my job. So what I would do if it's an individual is I would literally try to go to them and share that say hey I feel like this miscommunication happened we're here you made a change and tell us or we didn't tell you the change but either way I need you to know that's all of this it affects all of this we're gonna be flexible and make it happen but it felt like you weren't honoring the work I put in. So because I feel like I've had that conversation before so from that standpoint that would be me sharing that I feel like the miscommunication was maybe from a team member back to us so I would address it directly and then if for some reason that doesn't land then I would go up line I would go to my supervisor and again I would be element of trying to be humble and to own your own mistakes the same thing with ownership and humility you can take that into this conversation to say like hey if it was me messing up and I miscommunicated say this is where I miscommunicated I'm sorry just like again truth straight clear communication like sorry I got like this and it was wrong clarify what should have been communicated and apologize and be up front about that I think being quick to apologize goes a very long way on a congregational level too because we've definitely sent out emails with like wrong embed dates or something then you just send out another one saying hey we're so sorry we really hope you can sign up for baptism this weekend not this weekend or whatever it is and don't pretend that it didn't happen because mistakes happen you just have to own it so in summary own it be humble and kind of follow that back through reconciliation if I'm going to talk to you directly and then if it needs to be addressed I'm going to bring in our supervisor maybe we have like a full conversation just to share what's going on because again you want to leave communication between team members because you don't want that to affect events weekends ministry et cetera that helps Cassie can you review your onboarding process from the time someone approaches you and says I feel like I want to volunteer on this team till the time you're releasing the bill yeah so we have a class called the radiant class we have it about every other month and we try to keep that consistently going because that is where we point people to if they're attending and they want to get to know radiant more or they want to learn how to be on team radiant which is about to your team we tell them to sign up so that when they attend they get to hear a lot about the church history they get the opportunity to learn about different ministry opportunities or serving opportunities and fill out an application from the radiant class on that application goes to the correct ministries those pastors of those ministries or directors of those ministries review the information we get in touch with individuals and then we kind of connect them to see if the areas they want to serve is a good place for them to serve and usually it doesn't require anything outside if we do want them to go through the radiant class because that allows them to know understand the vision and the structure that we have here so that when they go to serve they are fully plugged in and like on board with what we're doing does that answer that was like a really quick so no background checks sorry if we do do background checks I'm doing a high level we have a couple different versions that we can do but we would definitely, if they have that application they have an opposition to the pastor a background check is done before they're officially on team radio and there's like a deeper layer of background check we do for kids ministry you don't mean that's right I don't know how long there is sorry for you to do the background check for every area in the ministry we do and then there's a deeper one that checks like multiple states and multiple addresses and it goes a little further that we do for kids ministry Daniel, if you can correct me I'm wrong did that answer your question? thank you training material now when you get something that wants to do a lot of telly if they're doing one that's a first impression yeah what type of training material do you have to let them see before you put them in that role? like physical materials it would honestly be I don't believe we have physical materials now so we don't go either we don't want to leave them at yeah I don't think we can raise church in the twin cities and then we also try to mentor them you know or they come with us the first couple of times well I thought maybe you might have something better yeah no that sounds great so the question I'm like I'm taking notes no, the question the question was if we have physical materials that we put in the hands of people who are on our first impressions or our hospitality teams and we don't have physical outside of them again going through that team gradient or the gradient class to be on team gradient helps them understand our entire operation and so that kind of downloads a little bit of the heart and then there's a training process where they're like shadowing one of our normal first impressions team members and there's a relational training that happens to find out if we don't have like a packet that we give them but we are getting close to wrapping up is there I don't know if it's on the other hand go ahead and we'll take your question and then we'll wrap up and I'll hang up with you guys after this we have more questions so I was just wondering about our whole church is smaller than Newstown church I can't always work very small kind of happens but I was wondering in a large environment that we were involved in is it conscientious who serves the servants in other words you know is there a hospitality for your team and the rest of the teams around here sort of the question is if there's a hospitality team to support the hospitality team so that if there's people supporting staff you know yes and for an event like this we have everyone scheduled out and we do have people in charge of getting our event team food like we had stuff that we helped think through ahead of time and literally all of our staff is doing different roles than we maybe would have otherwise to help facilitate them and I think that goes into weekends even sometimes depending on what we have going on our hospitality team is always very available to like our campus pastors our campus managers but I would say I appreciate that gradient by and large we're all looking for those opportunities and it kind of happens naturally because we communicate it as a value so it's kind of everybody but it's still an intentional communication and value that we put out in front of people and the people who are really at board kind of emanate that is that how it works? Yeah If I could we tried to do that too we tried twice a year just to have a meal for everybody on our team to bring them all together so for some we don't even know each other Yeah and that happens small or large we have two we have two