Embark on a transformative journey through theological education as we bring to the forefront an enlightening discussion with Greg Henson, president of Kairos University. Through our conversation, you'll gain a deeper understanding of how Kairos is revolutionizing seminary education with its Competency-Based Theological Education (CBTE) approach, detailed in Greg's latest book. We confront the skepticism about CBTE's academic integrity head-on, illustrating Kairos's unwavering commitment to excellence as affirmed by ATS and HLC accreditations.
We grapple with the current landscape of theological education, facing the winds of change in church attendance, funding, and the crucial relationship between seminaries and local communities. Greg and I also illuminate the parallels between today's transition from Christendom to post-Christendom and the early church's own adaptive journey, as chronicled in the Book of Acts. Delving into the CBTE model, we reveal its focus on mentorship and community-based learning, which offers a vibrant and relevant path for today's theological scholars.
The episode doesn't end with just insights; it offers a glimpse into a groundbreaking financial model that defies the norms of educational economics. Discover how Kairos's subscription-based tuition model has maintained affordability amidst a sea of rising costs, and ponder how such a revolutionary approach could reshape the financial landscape of education. We also celebrate the power of partnerships and community, as Kairos aligns with institutions like Luther House of Study to forge new, robust discipleship pathways within various faith traditions. Join us for this compelling episode that promises to reshape your understanding of seminary education's present and future.
Visit uniteleadership.org
Embark on a transformative journey through theological education as we bring to the forefront an enlightening discussion with Greg Henson, president of Kairos University. Through our conversation, you'll gain a deeper understanding of how Kairos is revolutionizing seminary education with its Competency-Based Theological Education (CBTE) approach, detailed in Greg's latest book. We confront the skepticism about CBTE's academic integrity head-on, illustrating Kairos's unwavering commitment to excellence as affirmed by ATS and HLC accreditations.
We grapple with the current landscape of theological education, facing the winds of change in church attendance, funding, and the crucial relationship between seminaries and local communities. Greg and I also illuminate the parallels between today's transition from Christendom to post-Christendom and the early church's own adaptive journey, as chronicled in the Book of Acts. Delving into the CBTE model, we reveal its focus on mentorship and community-based learning, which offers a vibrant and relevant path for today's theological scholars.
The episode doesn't end with just insights; it offers a glimpse into a groundbreaking financial model that defies the norms of educational economics. Discover how Kairos's subscription-based tuition model has maintained affordability amidst a sea of rising costs, and ponder how such a revolutionary approach could reshape the financial landscape of education. We also celebrate the power of partnerships and community, as Kairos aligns with institutions like Luther House of Study to forge new, robust discipleship pathways within various faith traditions. Join us for this compelling episode that promises to reshape your understanding of seminary education's present and future.
Visit uniteleadership.org
This is Lead Time.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Lead Time, tim Allman here. Jack Kalberg is actually not with me today, and here's why he's actually serving on jury duty.
Speaker 2:Believe it or not, he got onto a jury and I don't know he hasn't told me yet if it's how serious the whole process is, but anyway he's gone until like May, something or other mid-May. So whenever you're taking this podcast in, I pray. The joy of the Lord is your strength. And today I get to hang out with a longtime friend and partner in the gospel, greg Henson. Now, if you don't know about Greg, he is the president of Kairos University and has been a pilot for competency-based theological education. What used to be known as Sioux Falls Seminary is now no more. It is now Kairos University. So we could talk like leadership transitions, we could talk about culture and systems and structure all those things that we care about with the Unite Leadership Collective. But today we're going to be talking about his new book. It's called Theological Education Principles and Practices of a Competency-Based Approach.
Speaker 2:Now some of you hear about CBTE Competency-Based Theological Education, and Kairos in general, and maybe you've heard of Luther House of Study, our partner, and you've probably developed some preconceived notions and maybe some of those preconceived notions are negative, meaning CBTE and Kairos. It's flimsy academically, it's non-rigorous, it has cut corners around academic rigor and that's really. I'm using rigor because that word comes up all the time as I talk to seminary leaders, that what we have in terms of residential only is the gold standard that gets thrown around in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. The gold standard To which point I would say do you know that accreditation didn't come for a lot of our seminaries until about 40, 50 years ago? And yet there was great theological formative rigor that was taking place in residential seminary education prior to accreditation taking place.
Speaker 2:And now Kairos and Luther House and the partners that take place in the institution which is Kairos University, they have the same academic rigor because they're the same standards with ATS and HLC, the Higher Learning Commission. Those accreditations have been achieved by Kairos University. And so today's conversation is going to be super, super fun and I pray you're entering into it, whether you have an open mind or I pray that the Holy Spirit is just opening your mind to the new things that the Lord is doing in his big C Christian church. Greg, how are you doing today? Buddy, thanks for hanging with me.
Speaker 3:Doing great. Good to be here. Good to be here, tim. We'll pray for Jack and his jury duty, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I have successfully been invited to some of those. I haven't actually been on a jury.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I say I'm a pastor in a conservative Christian confessional, I'll throw out all of them. And I actually got off of one because I was like I'm going to talk Jesus stuff here. I'm a Christian, you know. Anyway, that didn't work for Jack. Evidently he's not a pastor, he's just an executive director at a church. So so good, let's get into the book, tell the story, kind of the origin story, of saying, hey, we need to, we need to write a book. I know you've, you've made the rounds, you've been on the tour, if you will, to many denominations and seminary leaders to talk about it. And was that kind of the origin? Hey, let's put this down so that people can kind of digest in written form what it is we're about.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it was a little bit of that. I sometimes tell people I was convinced to write a book under duress. Maybe I'm not a book kind of guy that's not what I. I tend to be more let's just talk. But as we've been doing this now for 10 years, like this is not new. So Kairos has been doing this for 10 years.
Speaker 3:Competency-based education is in the 70s, maybe even the 60s. You could probably talk about it in different ways. So what we're doing is not new, but it is relatively new in terms of how it's come together inside of theological education, and so myself and the co-author, kent Anderson, have been kind of the forerunners in talking about it for the past 10 years and alongside some others, there's some really great people that are having these conversations and felt it would be a good idea to put some of it down on paper in writing, just to capture some of the principles and practice of it, to create almost a lexicon or a way of talking about this approach to learning, to formation, because competency-based education has some of that stuff, but competency-based theological education that formative way of developing leaders for the church that didn't really have anything written down about it. So this is kind of the first book that does that. We thought it'd be good.
Speaker 3:You know me well enough, Tim. I like to consider change. I like to look at what is in the future. So there are already things that I'm like. I'd probably say that differently now, and the book's only been out for two months, and so You'll measure learn man.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right. What I've come to know in my time in the church is change is almost a curse word. I've been a pastor now for 16 years. Right, change Like. And anytime we talk about transformative, adaptive leadership, even in our tribe, you know, mission orientation, that can almost be synonymous with liberal and compromising the gospel. What is it? What's that all about, greg? Any just top of mind thoughts on that?
Speaker 3:I think there's a blessing and a curse maybe to the history and the confessional nature of the faith that we proclaim, like the gospel is unchanging, god is unchanging, god is evermore. Jesus is changing, but at the same time, jesus does invite us to follow Jesus, follow him into the world Right. And so I think we see in scripture the body of Christ constantly wrestling with what is the spirit doing and how do we join with the spirit and the work that the spirit is doing? And so we, I think we can do both. We can say who God is and what God is doing. Our confessions can stay, but our modes and our ways of engaging in that, I think we do have to listen to what the spirit is doing and how the spirit's inviting us to do that.
Speaker 3:I think that's what the whole book of Acts is about is the body of Christ trying to discern how do we do what God is inviting us to do now?
Speaker 3:Um, so I think, I think that is a challenge that we wrestle with as the church. It's not just your tribe, I think, all of us wrestle with that. I think the Academy wrestles with that is, how do we, how do we keep the essence of what we're doing, but not can not unintentionally conflate modality or delivery with outcomes. And I think that's the kind of the basis of competency-based theological education is trying to say well, quality and rigor has to be assessed through the outcomes of our work, not through the inputs. We assume sometimes that if we do the same things, if we have the same inputs, if we do the same work, that's going to be high quality, and I think with the church, with the academy, with us as just humans, it's. It's usually a better to look at the outcomes Like well, what, what happened as a result of the things that we were doing, and assess quality and rigor based on outcomes rather than inputs.
Speaker 2:You know, I've been reading a lot of Luther, believe it or not, recently. He's a great guy to read and he has this concept of God from below rather than God from above, and so this is kind of the dual nature of Christ. And it starts with the. We can't differentiate, like oh, jesus in his humanity did these things and Jesus in his divinity. No, he was always God and he was always man, and he chose to enter in as a baby. The incarnation is nuts, right. He had to be taken care of. He became one with us and the word became this is John 1, right, I mean, the word became flesh.
Speaker 2:And so I think we start from and I'm making that kind of theological point to say we start with what is God for you in the person of Jesus, and he's called us then in the waters of baptism, to be his own. He's given us a brand new identity, and then he invites us into a messy church, you know. So God meets us in the midst of our mess, in the midst of our confusion, our lack of understanding, and he helps us by the Spirit's power to grow, to change, to become more like him, for the sake of those who don't know him that we would be light in the midst of darkness. God enters from below and I don't know that I've made this point as it relates to competence-based theological education, but that is kind of the heart of what it is. Is God entering in through mentors, through his word, through learning classes, learning environments et cetera, to say I'm going to meet you where you are, I'm going to raise up a leader from your respective context, but then I'm going to cast vision for, hey, it could look like this our character, our competency, our craft, we're going to grow, whereas one of the things that it could be in the academic world and this is not to disparage necessarily you know from on high, going off to that place, you kind of like pride God from above, like taking the high place.
Speaker 2:It's easy to see why, when I am totally separated from my context, there was a hubris that could develop. I've gone to this place, which is on high. One of the reasons I like competency-based theological education is it starts from below rather than from on high, from the academy. It starts in the church and the academy was always kind of getting ahead of myself here. I'm obviously passionate about this subject, but the academy was always there to serve the local church, but something has happened over time where the local church is almost called to build up the academy. Anything more to add, as we're just kind of laying the groundwork for, because I think theological education at the grassroots is in line with Lutheran doctrine, from God coming from below, raising us up where we're at. Any thoughts there, greg?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think I think the coming from below, the phrase you're using, the meeting us where we are uh, we actually one of the phrases we use. It's actually in our mission statements. Uh, some of our you know strategy documents talks about meeting people where they are offering hope and uh, that's the whole. That's the way we think about clinical mental health, which is a whole other side of work that we do. But then the competency-based work is how do we meet people where they are and then help them walk to where God is calling them to be, wherever that, whatever that might be, whether it's pastoral leadership or, you know, we have fighter pilots and other things too Like how do we meet people where they are, walk with them and the journey of discipleship, a journey of following Jesus toward wherever it is God's calling them to do that.
Speaker 3:I think the challenge is and we talk a little bit about this in the book that, for whatever reason, I don't think seminaries just woke up one day and said you know what, we should just not worry about the local church. I don't think that happened. I don't think churches did that either. I don't think churches woke up like pastors like you and I was a pastor. Once upon a time I don't think people woke up and say you know what? I just don't need seminaries. We didn't intentionally do this, but in our desire to serve the missions that we felt God was calling us to, as a seminary or as a local church. I think in the midst of stress, in the midst of things that we were wrestling with in our cultures, I think we just started looking past each other. So Kent and I talk about it, and that's the language you use is that the local church began to look past the seminary to do the things it needed to do and the seminaries began to look past the local church to do what they needed to do.
Speaker 3:And our hope is that with CBT, you can actually start looking toward each other and recognizing that theological education is, at its core, a journey of formation, a journey where we are joining with God and what God is doing Right. So how do we look toward each other and recognize that we're a system, that theological education is a system of interconnected and then we would say, interdependent parts? So you can't, I would suggest, do theological education as a church without the academy and you can't do it as the academy without the church, and you actually need. All of us need each other. We need churches, we need denominations, we need seminaries. We need churches, we need denominations, we need seminaries, we need ministry training institutes in saharan africa. So like we need all of these things working together.
Speaker 3:Somewhere in scripture right, we read about the body of christ. Maybe we need theological education to function as as the body of christ, like we can't look at the church and say, well, I don't need you, you're a foot, I'm just going to be the hand or I'm just going to be the eye or whatever. We need everybody working together and I think CBTE opens the door to that possibility in some pretty exciting ways.
Speaker 2:So, before we get into the kind of nuts and bolts of CBTE, give your 30,000 foot historical view of why the church and the academy separated over time.
Speaker 3:I'd love to love to get your thoughts, one, two or three thoughts there, yeah, 30,000 foot, and you know in a short two seconds, whatever I say is going to be wrong, so it can be fine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, fair enough, it can be longer than two seconds.
Speaker 3:But the the the thing that I'm getting at is I'll just use seminaries as a prime example. I think, over the past maybe 50 years, 50 to 75 years, as more and more seminaries dealt with declining enrollment, struggling with finances, a rise in the administrative costs because of regulations, because of accreditation, things like that, we began all right, man, we've got to find a way to make this thing we call a seminary continue to thrive as an entity, as a legal going concern. And in that effort, I think we began saying well, hey, the denominations are not giving us as much money as they used to, so we got to find money from other places. Or we're not having as many students come through denominations, so we've got to create new programs to do these different things. And so it wasn't.
Speaker 3:We weren't blaming the church, but we were trying to figure out different ways to satisfy the challenges that we were having. And I think the church was like well, we need leaders and we need they were having some of the same questions how do we, how do we raise up leaders, how do we manage budgets? How do we do this in this milieu of a culture that's really shifting from Christendom to post-Christendom? And so that's been a long, long journey and I think we're just trying to solve some of those problems and I think we just sometimes forgot that we could do that together, sometimes forgot that we could do that together. And so I think that's where we find ourselves a lot today.
Speaker 3:Is that that growing chasm, that growing disconnect between the local church and the seminary or the denominations in the seminaries, and there are all kinds of things we could talk about related to that. But I think that's that's what happened. We're just trying to solve problems. Right, we were just how do we, how do we lean into this and solve problems? And we had different ways of imagining how to do that and I think where we failed all of us. So I don't think we can blame the church, I don't think we can blame denominations, I don't think we can blame schools, but I think all of us could look and say, well, we maybe could have done some of that a little bit differently, and the realities of today, I think, open the doors to those possibilities. We can imagine a new way of being.
Speaker 2:I often have made this comment on this podcast a number of times that pastors haven't necessarily been at the table when a lot of maybe changes to curriculum, the academy seminary et cetera were made, but I don't know what the day. So to give charity to our two seminaries in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. I don't even know what that table is and I don't know. I'm sure there were pastors that were at the table. I wasn't at the table and pastors may have been in different contexts. This is the way I kind of conceptualize it is. I don't think that we understood the change in culture and how we were no longer in the majority, like how quickly that transformation took place. And so the pastors that were at the table, that were maybe looking at some of the data. You know change is necessary. Prior to this is what leadership is right. Prior to it being necessary, leaders have to see what is in the future, what is coming down, and that requires a lot of courage because you're going to get just hit over and over again. And so the presidents that have been at our seminaries, the presidents in our synod this is a systemic thing, this is not a personal thing and culture has radically shifted and now we're trying to play catch up in some regards, and so a fair amount of empathy and compassion and care for one another in this conversation is definitely, definitely necessary. So good stuff.
Speaker 2:Let's get into the book a bit. You broke the book up into five parts. The problem here are the five parts One, the problem with theological education. We've kind of talked a little bit about that. If there's anything more you want to say, we can delve into that. The principles then of CBTE, the practices of CBTE, design proposals then for how CBTE gets executed, and then the paradigm shift that is necessary. We're going to dig into all of those. Shift that is necessary, we're going to dig into all of those. So, first off, is there any more problems with theological education in America that the book addresses that you haven't touched on just yet, greg.
Speaker 3:Top of mind, I think we've done a good job of. I mean, obviously you can read them in more detail but what we're trying to get at is that disconnect, that there's a disconnect between the work that we're trying to do as seminaries and the work that we're trying to do as the church, but that we're really trying to do together is a collaborative mission, which was where we get into some of the principles of this. So, yeah, I think the problem is I think a lot of people might have different ways of describing it, but that's it'd be hard You'd be hard pressed to say that isn't happening. We definitely do see that in the world of theological education, for sure.
Speaker 2:And it's cool to know a lot of Lutherans listen to this right, greg. I mean, this struggle between academy and church is not just a Lutheran struggle. This is taking place across Christian denominations in America. Isn't that true?
Speaker 3:It's not a Lutheran struggle, it's not a progressive struggle, it's not an evangelical struggle, a conservative struggle, whatever phrase you want to see it, it all comes back to that Christendom shift, that it's the shift from Christendom to post-Christendom and how we exist in a kind of post-Christian world, which we should maybe look then back to scripture even more intently and say, well, that's what the early church was wrestling with, right, and we could learn a lot from that. So everything pre-Constantine, there's a lot of stuff we could learn by looking at what the church was wrestling with there. And so, yeah, but it's not unique. I was actually on a call yesterday with a school and they're very, very different from the schools that work with in your tribe or even the schools that are part of my tribe, but they're wrestling with the same thing, like churches are just not connected anymore and they use the word chasm, just like I did, but they're very different context than the ones that you and I are familiar with.
Speaker 2:Man, I really want to talk for a long time about the book of Acts in the early church right now, but that's like a whole other podcast.
Speaker 3:We can do that another time. There's so many leadership principles there that we can dive into. It'd be fun. It'd be fun Tim.
Speaker 2:Release and trust in the Holy Spirit, the messiness of the early church and the rapid multiplication of churches and leaders that took place. It was slightly chaotic and the Lord did a marvelous thing. It was the greatest out of control and yet controlled by the Holy Spirit movement the world has ever known why? Because Jesus has died and he's been raised, and so what do we have to be afraid of? He's on the throne, he's reigning over all things, he sent his spirit, and so we can have great courage and great creativity in how we move across culturally to bring the never changing gospel of Jesus. I think that same heart of creativity is behind what CBT is all about. While standing on the never changing gospel of Jesus Christ, the world simply needs people, need Jesus. So define the primary principles this is the second part of your book, the primary principles for those who are, because some are really really well aware of what are you talking about and others not so much. So give us a primary principles there, greg. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Well, so let's do it this way, tim, if you're all right with it, let's have you name them and I'll walk through and talk with them as we go one by one, rather than doing them as a list. So you start with one and then I'll respond to that and we'll kind of go through it that way. I love it, because if I just kind of walk through it, honestly I'm going to take too much time.
Speaker 3:This is one of those topics that you and I could just spend all day on. So, in the benefit of each other and your listeners, you name one and we'll talk about it.
Speaker 2:So, mentors, mentor team.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So mentored teamwork is the idea that discipleship, following Jesus formation, is something that happens in community, and so when we're doing education we tend to do assessment of education from a one person perspective and traditionally that's not traditionally. In the last 50, 60, 70, 100 years that has been the faculty in a classroom. I think we sometimes forget that that model is new. That wasn't always the case. It that is the modern, the discipline, specific, segmented assessment of students is a modern adaptation of learning, and so mentored teamwork is trying to say let's take the benefits of all of that, so the faculty and the blessings that they bring, and buttress that with local voices so that we can have a holistic view of the student. So we talk about it as a 360 degree view of the student. That creates trustworthy assessment because you have multiple people looking at it and supporting the student along the way.
Speaker 2:So mentored teamwork there's a little bit of and I don't think you use this language in the book, but a rabbinic model that could attach to this. Say something there, greg.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's this idea that you're walking with a teacher, walking with a rabbi, walking with a mentor, and then I think the concern that people have there is well, what if my rabbi or, in the case in the world that we work in today, what if the church, the pastor that's serving as a mentor for me as I'm walking through the program, is a terrible human or is a bad pastor? Or what if I'm working with an apprentice in that model? What if the person I'm apprenticing, or I'm being apprenticed by, is just not really good at their job? How do we keep from having a myopic view of what ministry is? And I think that's where the academy actually can bring a beautiful voice to this.
Speaker 3:So in a CBTE world, you have both. You have the blessings of local mentors who can observe students in practice, and exposure to the wider body of Christ and the history of the church and the wider world of theology. That's happening. So students get both. They get localized expressions and contextualized understanding of leadership through that mentor team, but they also get the exposure that's provided through the academy and the long history of the church, and so we're trying to do both of those things at the same time.
Speaker 2:All right, so there's mentor team. It was a good summary. Let's talk outcomes rather than credits.
Speaker 3:Outcome rather than credit, given the credit hour a whole lot of power and it has become kind of a proxy for assessing quality of programs. So something that is 100 credit hours has more rigor and more quality than something that is 80 credit hours and that's based entirely on time. And if you go and do some of the research around the Carnegie credit hour and all that kind of stuff, you can actually find the people who created that actually said we should never do that with the credit hour. It should never be used in that way. But it has become the de facto way of measuring everything, from budgets to learning, to syllabi, to, if you look at any school, how much power the credit hour has is pretty high.
Speaker 3:And so what we're trying to do with competency-based theological education is say, rather than assuming quality based on credit hours or inputs, let's base it on outcomes that are integrated in nature. So it's not just hey, this person passed a class on preaching. It's, this person's preaching is demonstrated in observable ways. But then that demonstration is also seen in the way they lead it, they lead others and the way that they engage in the work of the church. So it's not just I preach a sermon on the fruit of the spirit. But the fruit of the spirit are also visible in the way I lead and the way I interact with other humans. And obviously we could have whole lots of theological debates about how that works in formation and how a Lutheran might say that and a Baptist might say that. But the point is an integrated outcome is saying we're going to assess based on the outcomes and we want those outcomes to look at multiple things rather than one discipline at a time.
Speaker 2:That's so good. So let's dig in just a little bit to evaluation around character and craft. And you know, let's see why am I drawing a blank on the other one Content, content, thank you. So the classroom, the way I kind of talk about it is, I mean content is the mind, content is a lot of the inputs, the learning experiences, also known as classes, which are in the Kairos and then for us, the Luther House world. There are certainly learning experiences, but then the mentor team is evaluating the character and then the execution, the doing of it. So it's both head, heart and hands as it relates to craft. We're evaluating all three of those things and you even go into a little bit of the nuts and bolts of what does a master outcome assessment look like and how rigorous is it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and that's what we call holistic assessment and trying to get at this idea that we want to assess If I'm being ornery, the way I say it is, we actually want to assess knowledge, but what we've in our, in our culture and modern academic culture, modern culture in general. This is not the academy, this is just us. In the world we live in, we have synonymized knowledge and content. So when someone says that person knows scripture, what we mean is that person has a cognitive understanding of the content related to scripture. That definition or way of thinking about knowledge is actually an enlightenment. You know empirical, rationalist nature of thinking about knowledge. That is not the way Hebrew, the Hebrew understanding of knowledge or the way Jesus understood knowledge. That is not a biblical understanding of knowledge. A biblical understanding of knowledge gets uh and understands the fact that the word no in Hebrew means a whole lot more than cognitive understanding. So when you know to be maybe a little crass here, when it says that Joseph knew not Mary, it didn't mean Joseph didn't have a cognitive understanding of who Mary meant, who Mary was. So, anyway, knowledge is a whole lot more than content. But what we've done in our educational models and this is true for all of education, not just theology. We've assumed that knowledge means content.
Speaker 3:So when we say holistic assessment, we want to pay attention to well, yeah, they need a cognitive understanding. They do need to have a cognitive understanding of what John 1 means. When you look at it with Greek, when you look at it in its context. What does all of that mean? That's a cognitive piece on who you are and how you understand who God is and what God is doing in the world your character, then the content has just stuck in your head. It's the whole. When Jesus says even the, even the demons know that Jesus is Lord, like not Jesus doesn't say that it's in another part of the scripture, but when, when we see that that's the concept like it's, it's really simple to have a cognitive understanding of scripture. That's not the same thing as having that understanding inform your character and inform how you work with other people, and that's your craft piece.
Speaker 3:So holistic is trying to get at. You need to have a cognitive understanding. That piece doesn't go away, it just gets enhanced by. You also need to be able to show how that impacts your life and how you work with other people. That's the content, character and craft piece.
Speaker 3:So when you're doing a master assessment of an outcome is what we call them. We're at competency, you're looking at all of those things. So the mentor team can say, well, this person is, you know, and they could teach other people the content of this outcome, but we haven't actually observed in them yet their ability to put that content to practice in their work as a leader, or we haven't seen how it's shaped, who they are in Christ. So we're going to work a little bit more on that. So a master assessment is more of a iterative, ongoing reflection on what the person has done and what we've seen in them as a mentor team. And you can do that through assignments, you could do oral reviews, like you might in a doctoral program so many different ways you can do that. But what you're paying attention to is content, character and craft, because we would suggest that integration of those that's what knowledge is Integrated knowing is content, character and craft.
Speaker 2:Let's talk affordability. Now, this is the big one that I, as a pastor that cares about, yes, deep theological formation, a Lutheran mind in our context, I do care about reaching more people with the gospel and starting new churches. We talk about this a lot on this podcast and scale is a thing. Lot on this podcast and scale is a thing. I was talking with one seminary leader about this topic of affordability and he kind of said because one of the paths, a lot of the paths, are around $40,000 to $50,000 non-degree. This is the SMP program in our context, which is an adaptive model. But I think we could do better, especially around affordability, which is one of the reasons that I got super, super interested in Kairos and he goes well.
Speaker 2:Have you thought about bringing other churches in to help you afford to send that one man into the SMP program, one man into the SMP program? At which point I realized, oh my goodness, his paradigm is entirely, entirely different than the way I'm thinking at the local church right now, because he's thinking 10 churches to raise up one man. I'm thinking one church to raise up 10, 10 leaders and therefore church leaders have to to have to think about scalability and and cost. How have you and the whole network like, how does the financial engine of this thing run? I think there's a lot of mystery around that, greg, so get into the financial model, that'd be great yeah, it's, it's just like bailing wire and twine.
Speaker 3:That's, that's how. But no, the uh, the one of our faculty who's been around from the beginning of this transformation into this way of being as a school, he actually refers to what we do in this way. His name is Philip Thompson. He's a theologian. Philip's amazing. He talks about, he says what Kairos has an innovative educational model, but a revolutionary financial model.
Speaker 3:So he would say, yeah, what we do with education and mentor teams and all that's nice, that's new, that's creative, that's innovative. But it's really not that special, it's just a thing. The financial model, or I might say, our operational model, our way of being, that's the thing that's revolutionary. And I think he's spot on when he says that. And I think CBTE opens the door to having conversations about alternative financial models. So we use subscription pricing, so students only pay $300 a month for their tuition and so it really is a subscription. They never owe more than $300 a month at a time. And I think what's cool there, tim and this is going to sound, you know, self-promotional here. I apologize for that we haven't changed that in 10 years. It's unbelievable.
Speaker 2:Inflation is a thing.
Speaker 3:Inflation is a thing, by the way, inflation is an actual thing and we have not changed it in 10 years. So not only is it $300 a month, but it's actually it's gone Technically, it's gone down in terms of relative costs, and so we have intentionally kept it at $300 a month, which means I think I did the math the other day it's somewhere like $1.5 million in tuition revenue that we have is lower this year than it would be if we had just kept that $300 with inflation. So not only is it affordable, but we are committed to that concept in pretty irrational ways maybe is the way to talk about it. It's a big deal for us, but the way we do that is through the subscription pricing approach. There's a reason that you see that happening across society as a whole. It's not just schools. We've actually helped a handful of other seminaries move into that direction. So there's schools that are not doing competency-based education but do subscription pricing. But there's a reason that it's it's a very. It's growing and has become a pretty common financial model for barbershops and every like everywhere does this because it's easier to manage, and so for schools it's significantly less expensive for us to operate a financial model that uses subscription pricing. So the cost early on in my time as when. So this is a leadership thing.
Speaker 3:We worked pretty hard as I worked with the team to say we got to identify a KPI metric that's going to connect all of the dots, and the one I suggested was what I call cost to educate a student. So how much does it cost us, I call cost to educate a student. So how much does it cost us as an institution to educate a single student every year? And when I started that number was around $25,000 a year per student. Today that number is around $4,000-ish per student, and so some people look at it like well, so obviously you're only spending $4,000 a year. And so some people look at it like well, so obviously you're only spending $4,000 a year, so obviously it can't be of high quality, like you can think that. Or we've figured out new ways to imagine cost structures, so we have a lot more variable in a face-to-face environment. But that doesn't mean we have to house all of that, and so we've done some pretty cool things in that area. But really the financial model is predicated on creating predictability around tuition and revenue that's what a subscription does but then also leveraging the cost structures in some pretty exciting ways. So we have a whole lot fewer costs than most schools have.
Speaker 3:And one prime example that schools would totally get is I don't really have to pay attention to add drop weeks. So when a student registers for 15 credit hours but ends up taking 12 credit hours, that has a huge impact on schools because they have to change their financial aid, they have to change their registration, they have to do things. Well, what if the class that the student dropped now means that class has six students in it instead of eight, and we have to. Only we can't run that class anymore. But now we are going to run that class with six students, which means we're going to lose money on that class because usually run it with eight and like we don't have to do any of that, we don't have to pay attention to any of that, I don't have to have staff paying attention to that, and it really reduces our costs around some of those things.
Speaker 2:So wow, I was thinking $25,000 actual cost to train a student, that's actually pretty low, I know.
Speaker 3:It is. It is. Even then it was low. I mean it was average. I mean the average for ATS is probably somewhere around there. There are schools within ATS the Association of Theological Schools that spend $200,000 a year per student, but the average is going to be somewhere in the 20 to 30 range.
Speaker 2:And so it's a stewardship issue of the resources of God's people and at both of the seminaries in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. I will not throw out the numbers, but there's somewhere between $25,000 and $200,000 a year to train students, and we can do it for four. So let me play devil's advocate a little bit. Who actually is running this thing? I mean, you've got who's on your team. There has to be what's board structure, accountability, look like. What's your infrastructure staff? What's your operating budget? How can you do it for $4,000? This doesn't make sense, Greg, and I'll lead you with this. The partners you should talk about your partnerships. That's a huge part of what Kairos does.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I appreciate that. So there's a few business principles that I think are important for all seminaries to think about, and then I'll get into kind of that theological commitment to partnership stuff. But if you look through the history of the recent history of the association of theological schools and the data associated with it, there aren't really any data points that say, oh, if a school does this, they'll be successful. So you know, if a school does online education, they'll be successful, if a school does residential, they'll be successful. And what you find is it's just all over the map. There are schools who are a hundred% on campus and are growing, and there are schools that are 100% online and they're declining. There aren't. There's just no trend that you can find, and Chris Meinzer, who's the CFO for ATS, he would tell you all of that kind of stuff. But what you do see is schools that have multiple revenue streams. So any schools where no single revenue stream is greater than, say, 40 percent of their total revenue, they tend to have longer term stability. That's probably the only thing, and I probably need to check and see if that data how it is today, because the last time I checked it was maybe four years ago. But the the idea there is multiple revenue streams years ago. But the idea there is multiple revenue streams.
Speaker 3:So when we started at Sioux Falls, what I worked with the board on was saying, whatever we do, we got to lean into that we can't have tuition or giving or endowments or anything, be our total the biggest thing, or one of more than that 40%, and that's part of what we do. So part of our financial model is tuition is 30-ish, 40 ish percent, maybe somewhere around there. But then we also we run one of the largest outpatient mental health clinics in our region and so we have I don't know it might be close to 30, 40 therapists. That and we have four different mental health clinics locations and you know we'll have somewhere around 30,000 sessions this year in that work, and so that's a big part of what we do as well. And then we do have giving and endowments and we have rental spaces and all that. But it's a we're trying to diversify revenue streams. So that's that's one thing. That's part of our business model.
Speaker 2:So pause there. You basically run like I didn't even know this. Greg, I'm learning something here today. This is awesome. So you're an institution, kairos University, that runs a mental health clinic Four of them, four of them that produces 30% of your revenue. You're running a business within an institution.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so it's a missional business in the sense and we've been doing it for almost 50 years. So 40, 50 years ago one of our faculty donated his counseling practice to the seminary and then we've leaned into that as well. Part of our call as a school is to serve the community. For us it's a missional theology thing. This is a way God is inviting us to serve the community. It's a it's for us, it's a missional theology thing. Like this is a way God is inviting us to serve our community, not with education, just to be present.
Speaker 3:So we have we have a community counseling clinic where people who are underinsured can still come even if they can't afford it. We have child and adolescent therapy clinics. We have all of the things and it's a full fledged mental health clinic and have been doing that for a long time. But we also have master's degrees in counseling and master's degrees in marriage and family therapy and a doctor of professional counseling and all of it's intertwined into our mission. So it's not like we just started a business. But when I started at Sioux Falls 10 years ago, that piece of what we were doing was very missionally aligned, but not necessarily very financially aligned, and so we spent a lot of time in those early years dealing with some of those issues how do we make this, how do we steward that resource really well so that it can not only grow and do the things that it's invited to do, but be part of the strategic alignment in terms of finances for the school, and so we've worked pretty hard at that.
Speaker 2:There's so many reasons I really enjoy talking to you, greg, but that's one of them. Because to do transformative, adaptive leadership, one of the best principles is a thing within a thing. Sounds super simple, but you inherit something that's maybe struggling, start a new thing or double down on another thing that will change. And it does so many things, not just create revenue, it just creates an open mindset. It creates a possibility mindset. So maybe you're an institutional seminary leader. Could you dream, could you and your faculty dream, about doing something creative to be a blessing in the community and create an alternative revenue stream Novel. That's so, so good. So that's like 70% Go ahead.
Speaker 3:That's what the counseling center has been and that's the Kairos project, which was now the thing that kind of defines us. That's what it was it was. If you read our earliest blog post about it, we called it an experiment, we call it a pilot. We're like we have no idea if this is going to work. When I talked with students in the very first 15 students we had, I actually sat with them and said look, I'm only going to charge you $100 a month for tuition. I'm probably going to spend more money on food for you than you're going to give us in tuition. In response to that, you can't complain about this. Like, I just need you to help us decide how this is going to work.
Speaker 3:Well, as we experiment with a thing inside of a thing, it wasn't a thing we did as a school. It was something we piloted for that very reason and it falls into something that I call. It's a whole framework I've built now on practicing innovation. It's taking the best stuff we know about innovation and change and marrying it with the best thing we know about spiritual practices and formation and saying well, actually, innovation is something that you practice that then forms and shapes you into an organization that is innovative Versus innovation is an idea that you come up with a really creative idea and do that thing Well. Actually, innovation is a practice that you live into, that shapes and forms you as a community.
Speaker 2:And there's nothing new, it's all God's. It's just taking something that already exists and then another thing that exists and running tests to try them and put them together. That's what Kairos University has evolved into. So that build, measure, learn, the lean, startup mindset is exactly what Kairos University is all about. So that's as I'm thinking, funding. That's like 70% of your funding.
Speaker 3:What is the other 30, 40%, yeah we have a small endowment we have giving. We have rental properties, things like that. We were given some gas wells that you know one year might make some money, the next year might make $5. So it's one of those revenue streams you can't really count on. But, uh, it's.
Speaker 3:It's trying to pay attention to all of those things, but I think and you've used this word a few times, tim it's thinking about our, our, our financial operations from the perspective of stewardship, and so it's saying, uh, stewardship is about what you have, not what you don't have, and we serve an abundant God who has entrusted us with abundant resources, and God has given us everything we need to do the work that God is inviting us to do. I think, sometimes within the United States I can't speak for the entire world, obviously, but within the United States seminaries we tend to talk about what we need is more money, we need more students, we need more money, we need more of something, and I do feel like you know, every year, collectively, as a group of ATS schools, we get something in the neighborhood of two billion dollars in new, unrestricted giving every year and I feel like we probably have the resources that we need.
Speaker 3:We might just need to think about how we steward them and then to get into your partnership piece.
Speaker 3:The piece that we've done is say well, what if we also not only thought about how we steward resources, but recognizing we are part of a community.
Speaker 3:So when we partner with United Leadership Collective or we partner with Luther House or we partner with, we have a school in Germany that we partner with, a school in Australia that is a denomination in Australia that started a school for the purpose of partnering with Kairos University, and the point is we can then distribute costs across the body of Christ rather than all of those having to be housed in one place. So the school in Germany can develop mentors and develop students and can develop things that are contextually relevant for that community, on this platform and in this wider community. But all of it reduces the cost because the school in Germany doesn't have to have a registrar in the same way, doesn't have to have a financial office in the same way that they might if they were doing it all on their own, and we don't have to have German faculty, because they already have German faculty. So it's distributing the costs and recognizing that we're all participating in the work that God is doing. So we're not competing with each other. There is no competition in the kingdom of God.
Speaker 2:Amen. So if a seminary wanted to just tell the story of a seminary who says you know what? We're going to run a test with Kairos. We've got residential going on. Talk about what that looks like.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so in 2014,. We didn't call it competency-based education at the time. We called it theologically informed, outcomebased Education. I have no idea why that name didn't stick Tim, it's a beautiful, beautiful name.
Speaker 2:It's as creative as your book title. It's as creative as your book title.
Speaker 3:The book title is amazing Theological education so good, so creative, you said very sarcastically, but the idea was, if we're going to do this, we got to experiment with it, we got to pilot it and, by God's grace, the team at Sioux Falls Seminary the faculty, the staff, the board, the community that we work with was all in. They were like you know. You know this as a leader and from the conversations you have. It's very uncommon to find a group of people who say we want to change, who actually do want to change, and God had already been doing so many good things at Sioux Falls Seminary for the 10 years before I got there. So when we started conversations about what is now the Kairos Project, it was more just here's how we, here's how we practically do those things that we've been talking about. It wasn't. I didn't have to convince anybody that this was a thing. It was well, let's live into this mission that God has called us. And so we.
Speaker 3:We started that in 2014 with 15 students, and then the next fall we added another, maybe 30 students, and then the fall after that we added maybe another 40. So it was a small growth, but by about year two or three, uh, when people would apply, you couldn't find it on our website. We didn't tell anybody about it, we weren't marketing about it, we weren't advertising, we spent no money on it. But every new student would call us and say I hear this, there's this thing called the Kairos Project. I want to know more about that. It was like the thing you're not supposed to talk about, but everybody talked about anyway and so that's and it was. It was about two and a half years and that was when all of the new students were like that's the thing I want to do is is the Kairos project, and since then it's been how do we serve those that God places in our care? Cause we still don't spend any money on advertising or marketing.
Speaker 3:But there are students for whom traditional learning experiences in a classroom or on a campus or on Zoom or whatever that those are really great opportunities for them. And then there are others for whom that style of learning is actually detrimental to their growth or that style of learning privileges people with certain amounts of time, and there's a whole awesome book called Students First by Paul LeBlanc that really challenges people to think about the privilege of time and how that works within our society different opportunities for learning experiences. But underneath of it all is this commitment to proficiency-based learning. And so when you disconnect the modality from the outcomes, the possibilities for innovation are endless, because you're really saying, well, I'm not assessing people based on modality, I'm assessing people based on outcomes. And when you do that shift, which is we didn't come up with that, that's competency-based education from the 60s and 70s, there's just the power is pretty dramatic for what you can do.
Speaker 2:And credits. The credit pathway still has outcomes that it's tied to.
Speaker 3:We still award credit hours. The credit hour just doesn't have any power. We still award credit hours if you read the federal government regulations around accreditation. So what we do is what's called course and credit-based competency-based education, and if someone was going to talk to me, that's the version of a competency-based education. I would recommend. There's another version called direct assessment, which we don't do, but in ours you still have courses that are credit hour based. So when someone graduates, their transcript is going to say skillful biblical exegesis six credit hours in fall 2025 or whatever. It's just that they don't have to do all of it in fall 2025. They could do. They could start it in fall 2025 and finish in 2026. Or they could. You know it's the pace is set by the student, not by the clock. But there's still courses, there's still credit hours.
Speaker 2:I love it. We're coming down the homestretch here. I could go so many different directions. Talk about because a lot of Lutherans listening what is your relationship like with the Luther House of Studies. Talk about that partnership in particular with the Luther House of Studies.
Speaker 3:Talk about that partnership in particular. That's a really awesome partnership that has grown in many ways over many years. So Luther House started as a partnership between Sioux Falls Seminary, the Augustana Synod or not the Augustana Synod the South Dakota Synod of the ELCA.
Speaker 2:Which is like a district for those that are listening to the LCMS. It's like a district, yep.
Speaker 3:So and Augustana University which is why I said Augustana, so Augustana Sioux Falls Seminary in the South Dakota Synod for the purpose of training Lutheran pastors. So the story that I because they did that before I ever got here, so I wasn't here when the Luther house stuff started and so Sioux Falls seminary would have a faculty that we paid part of, and that was Chris Krogan, and we did different things. And uh, the the story goes that you know, we had a lot of great Lutherans who would graduate from Sioux Falls seminary, a Baptist seminary, and uh, the the like the candidacy committees would say, man, these are really great people, but they sound Baptist. We really need them to sound Lutheran in order to serve in Lutheran churches. So that's why we created Luther house was to create a very Lutheran um formational opportunity for students who are pursuing a master divinity. Over time, that grew to what now is.
Speaker 3:Luther house is its own legal entity, its own doing all of its own work around developing pastors and providing content and doing some really, really great things. And so they partner with us where so students can pursue a master divinity from Kairos University, but they work with Luther House, which provides contextualized learning experiences, and so you might call them courses. We they're technically not courses, they're technically called learning experiences. So they're going to do something on Lutheran confessions or the Lutheran reformation or the, the three articles of the. You know they were going to do all that stuff.
Speaker 1:And it's going to be led by.
Speaker 3:Lutherans from a Lutheran perspective, so that they are formed in that Lutheran tradition. We actually do that very thing with lots of different traditions. So we have a similar thing for the Methodist tradition. We have a thing called the Wesley Leadership Institute. We've got lots of different people, because when you're focused on outcomes the path can vary. So we have one for chaplains, so say people who are pursuing military chaplaincy, and they can work with our four chaplains house of study. So we partner with others so that, like Luther house, students can work through a curriculum that is a master divinity but shaped, informed and contextualized within Lutheran context or Lutheran junior high school. I have been through the Lutheran confirmation classes, which I felt a little bad. I didn't actually get confirmed because I wasn't Lutheran, but I've been through all this stuff. It's pretty fun.
Speaker 2:So Kairos is a platform. I personally have some connections to it. I love it. I love it, kairos. So, to double down, kairos, the whole model, is a platform, the way we often talk about it. When Luther House, like you guys, have provided the phone, then we get to, and if LCMS players wanted to come in, we get to put the respective apps in there, learning experiences, et cetera. And the accreditation by and large. I know you have some who have maybe pursued their own type of accreditation, but the partners, most of them Luther House of Study, the accreditation process is driven by Kairos, not necessarily Luther House, even though they're a separate partner entity. Isn't that true, Greg?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the Kairos, because they're all Kairos degrees. So when someone graduates, they graduate from Kairos University. The diploma says Kairos University, the transcript says Kairos man because they're all Kairos degree. So when someone graduates, they graduate from Kairos University. The diploma says Kairos University, the transcript says Kairos University. But they've been have the opportunity to be formed.
Speaker 3:The reason we call it a house of study because that concept is not new. You know, there's Baptist houses of study and Lutheran and there's a church and there's a school in Memphis, I think, that has a black church house of study. There's a school in Memphis, I think, that has a black church house of study. So it's not an uncommon thing. We just have the ability for those to have a little bit more influence because of the competency-based nature. But the platform concept is the thing that we're trying to do. If you dive deep into platform organizational principles and platform philosophies around business models, you'll find a lot of similarities between that and what we're trying to do as a school, because platforms have a network effect which impact uh kind of. It's kind of an all boats rise uh approach, and it's been really cool to see.
Speaker 2:Yeah, amen, and the amount of students you have in the entire network platform right now. What are you looking at?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so if people who are pursuing a degree, so when they graduate they're going to get an accredited degree of some sort, that's probably right around 12, 1300. If you include the whole community, so it's students and partners and people who are not pursuing a degree but are engaged, we have something called a discipleship path, things like that that community is probably around 7,000 people spread out on six different continents. And the difference between that the 1200, around 7,000 people spread out on six different continents and the difference between that the 1,200 to 700,000 is one of the things that I'm actually most excited about, because theological education, a part of that is earning a degree. But it doesn't have to be that. God didn't say go forth and create master of divinity graduates. God Jesus says go forth and make disciples. Well, some disciples are going to earn degrees. Lots of them don't need to, and so how do we walk with the whole body, and that's why I love the difference between the two numbers.
Speaker 2:So good. So I'm going to close with this invitation to LCMS leaders we could have a Lutheran Church Missouri Synod House of Studies test in partnership with one or more districts. We've recently produced a white paper at the invitation of some seminary leadership. It got distributed to our Council of Presidents so 35 presidents in the the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod district presidents to the Presidium, which is the vice presidents and kind of board and it was a really, really well done white paper. If you want to find that, it's on our website at uniteleadershiporg theidouniteleadershiporg, and it talks about discipleship and formation and the evolution and theological education and the need right now to run respective tests. And so I really don't believe, like at the core, when and this is from experience, this is very pragmatic when you run institutional leader, a test that damages your institution, the test could amplify your residential program and honestly I believe to my core that it would. If there were tests that were run in one or more districts throwing out Mike Gibson in the Pacific Southwest, let's run it here. We've got so many different people groups, so many different churches that are small, in need of raising up local leaders, maybe bivocational, co-vocational, if you ran that test, the brand of theological education in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, which you know I'm biased, I'm a Lutheran through and through man. I believe that our theology, our influence in the wider church would grow and more and more students you talk all boats rise more and more students would want to go to residential education if you offered more adaptive opportunities for online mentorship et cetera. And so this is to Larry Rast I know you're retiring. We're looking for another president at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne. Whoever you are, this is an open invitation to you to have a conversation with you and myself, and maybe Chris and Sarah at Luther House, to explore this with more curiosity rather than condemnation. And to Tom Egger, who is a president at Concordia Seminary in St Louis. The invitation is still open, brother, and would love to have more conversations with you and your team. This is so much fun.
Speaker 2:The days are too short, greg, for us to argue over form. You know to debate over this is the best way. You know to debate over this is the best way. And no one to this date has shown me to double down on what you said, that residential only is the best and only separate, rather than the rabbinic model, et cetera. No one showed me that.
Speaker 2:All we know is people need to hear the gospel and, to put it in a Lutheran context, the word of God. This is, I think, just a Christian context. The word of God needs to be proclaimed and it needs to enter into the ear and enter into the heart to create faith. And we need more proclaimers proclaimers going to the book of Acts from house to house, to the temple courts or the churches that are largely vacant. More of those proclaimers are waiting.
Speaker 2:Is someone going to notice me? Is there going to be a way that I could enter into this? And they should have an imposter complex. A lot of pastors, you know they fight with this. You're speaking the words of God. You should be remarkably humble, you should, but someone needs to call that words of God. You should be remarkably humble, you should, but someone needs to call that out of you. So maybe you're just a lay leader. You're listening to this. Maybe you start to say, hey, there's an elder who's been here for a long period of time and he's led a great Bible study, but he's never really been poured into by a lot of folks. Maybe he just enters in as a non-degreed learner in partnership with Luther House of Studies and Kairos in general. Everybody can play in this model, and that's what I love about it so much. And so any final words. Greg, this has been so fun.
Speaker 3:We could talk forever, tim. This is fun. On that last note, we actually I was on last night I was with a Zoom on a Zoom meeting with a partner that we're working with. It's not a Lutheran partner and they're in a different tradition, but what you're just described as the lay leader. They're not getting a degree. They have 25 students in their churches that are doing that very thing and we call it a discipleship path and it's $25 a month. They work with a mentor team. They get a certificate when they're done, but it's not a degree. Now, if they wanted to, they could roll that into a degree and start working on a degree with us, but it's $25 a month to develop Proclaimers of the Word $25, man, wow, that's cheaper than Netflix, bro.
Speaker 2:That's so good. So this has been so much fun. If people want to connect with you, how can they do so? Greg and Kairos in general.
Speaker 3:The best way to do that I mean our website is kairosedu Email address. You can just use info at kairosedu. I'm a pretty transparent person.
Speaker 2:They can email me if they want to. So it's ghenson at kairosedu. So good, this is Lead Time. Sharing is caring, like subscribe, comment, whatever it is you take in these conversations, and we promise to continue to have Jesus-centered, creative conversations that inspire us to dream big dreams to reach people with the never-changing gospel of Jesus Christ. Thanks so much, greg. It's a good day. Go and make it a great day. You rock, bro. This was fun, amen.
Speaker 3:Have a good day, man, you too man.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to Lead Time, a podcast of the Unite Leadership Collective. The ULC's mission is to collaborate with the local church to discover, develop and deploy leaders through biblical Lutheran doctrine and innovative methods To partner with us in this gospel message. Subscribe to our channel, then go to theuniteleadershiporg to create your free login for exclusive material and resources and then to explore ways in which you can sponsor an episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for next week's episode.