1. Dale Sellers returns as the first repeat guest in the show's history to announce that 95 Network is becoming The Renewed Pastor.

2. Most pastors Dale has met across four decades of ministry are discouraged, and seminary training rarely prepares them for the part of the job that actually wears them down: leading people.

3. Fewer than ten percent of pastors in Dale's conference rooms have ever raised a hand to say they take a real day off every week.

4. The two issues surfacing most in pastors right now are the refusal to Sabbath and confusion about identity and calling.

5. When a pastor's gifting does not match what the church needs in its current season, the natural default is to hide the gap, and hiding is exhausting.

6. Many moral failures are less about wanting to blow up a life and more about a leader desperate to get off the merry go round.

7. The Renewed Pastor Pathway is a year long, one on one coaching track built around soul care, identity and context, vision and clarity, and leadership development with a succession plan.

8. The goal is a thousand healthy pastors over the next ten years, with scholarships available for those who cannot cover the cost.

If you are leading a church that needs to be revitalized, you have probably built a list of things that need to change. The building. The website. The systems. The volunteer pipeline. Somewhere on that list, usually last, is you.

In this episode Bart Blair sits down with Dale Sellers, who has spent his ministry life serving small and midsize churches and who has now decided to spend the next decade of it on one thing: helping pastors get healthy. Dale is the first repeat guest in the history of the Revitalize My Church podcast, and he came back to share both the story behind his own collapse and the reason his ministry is changing its name.

You will hear why Dale thinks the training pipeline sets pastors up to be blindsided. You will hear the moment a board member put a hand in his face and told him to stop talking about his struggles. You will hear what he sees when a pastor is not as healthy as they think they are, and what he is building to help. If you have been running on empty and telling yourself the church needs you too much for you to stop, this conversation is for you.

Dale and his wife Regina spent the first decade of their marriage traveling with music groups, playing somewhere in the neighborhood of eleven hundred concerts in churches across more than thirty states. He was in his twenties, full of energy, and could not understand what he kept seeing.

• Almost every pastor he met was discouraged. Church after church, state after state, the same weariness in the room.

• He did not understand it until he took a local church role. Within two weeks, he says, he figured it out.

• The road is not the same as the pew. As he puts it, when you travel you blow in, you blow up, and you blow out. Ministry in one place with the same people week after week is a different job entirely.

• The training gap is real. Pastors are taught to preach, to handle Greek and Hebrew, to work through hermeneutics. Very few are taught how to lead people.

That gap eventually caught up with Dale personally. He pastored a church that went from thirty to three hundred and then back down to one hundred fifty after a split in year eight. The stress of it landed him in quadruple bypass surgery at fifty three, which his surgeon attributed to stress rather than family history.

"The church is the only hope for the world. There is no plan B. So we have got to...

Five Takeaways From This Episode

1. Evangelism is not either personal or corporate. It is both, and a church that neglects either one will stall out.

2. The Great Commission was given to the disciples collectively, not to individuals in isolation. God's strategy for reaching lost people is his church.

3. When 94% of pastors do not feel effective at sharing the gospel outside the pulpit, a shared church strategy removes pressure rather than adding it.

4. Every believer should be able to articulate their own testimony in two minutes and clearly explain the gospel. Training for that is not optional.

5. Find the person in your church who is evangelistically gifted, empower them, and build your process around the gifts God has already placed in your body.

   Is Your Church's Evangelism Personal, Corporate, or Both?

   Bart opens this episode by talking about the weather, on purpose, so he can ask you a better question: have you taken the temperature of your church's evangelism and outreach lately?

   If you lead a church that is plateaued or declining, this is one of the hardest conversations to have honestly. You know the vast majority of your people are not regularly sharing their faith. You may not be either. And the temptation is to swing hard toward one solution, either a heavy program of outreach events or a push to train every individual member to become a personal evangelist.

   Nathan Bryant and Bart Blair make the case in this episode that the swing itself is the problem. This is a both/and conversation, and churches that only pick one side of it end up frustrated.

   "I don't think you can have an effective corporate evangelistic engagement without personal evangelistic engagement happening, because it's actually the combination of the both." Nathan Bryant

   Why the Great Commission Was Given to the Church, Not Just to Individuals

   Nathan makes a point in this episode that reframes the whole conversation. When Western Christians hear "go and make disciples," we hear it as a personal command directed at us as individuals. That reading is not wrong, but it is incomplete.

   • Jesus gathered them first. He called his disciples together and commissioned them collectively, to go and make disciples together.

   • No individual has every gift. A single believer was never meant to carry a lost person through the entire journey from first contact to mature discipleship.

   • The church is the strategy. God's plan for reaching the lost is the collection of people and the varied gifts he has distributed among them.

   Bart reads from 1 Corinthians 3 in the episode, where Paul describes himself as planting and Apollos as watering while God gives the growth. The passage is not just about unity. It is about the division of labor in kingdom work.

   What Percentage of Christians Actually Share Their Faith?

   Bart went looking for a clean statistic on how many born-again believers in North America regularly share their faith with someone who is not yet following Jesus. He came back without one. The reports vary too widely to give a clear number.

   What the reports agree on is the direction: far fewer believers are sharing their faith than are not. And you can verify that in your own congregation, whether you have 20 people or 2,000.

   One number did stand out. A Barna report referenced in the episode found that only 6% of pastors surveyed felt they themselves were effective at sharing the gospel with non-believers. That means 94% of pastors carry a quiet lack of confidence in their ability to lead someone to Christ outside of a Sunday sermon.

   That number matters for a specific reason. Most churches do not have enough non-believers in the room on a...

1. Shawn Kennedy planted a church in San Diego that grew for fifteen years, then felt called back to replant the very church that first shared the gospel with him.

2. That church, Church at the Shores in Gulf Shores, Alabama, was three to six months from closing when Shawn arrived. Eight years later it is thriving.

3. Shawn unpacks what it actually took to turn the church around, including culture, finances, leadership structure, and a renewed sense of joy.

4. He also explains how the Fresh Start Network partners healthy churches with struggling ones to help them find new life.

5. Shawn shares an early look at his upcoming book on spiritual formation, inspired by a conversation with a vineyard's vine dresser in Tuscany.

If you lead a church that feels like it is running out of time, this episode is for you. You will hear from Shawn Kennedy, who has walked both sides of church revitalization. He led a healthy, growing church for fifteen years, then felt God calling him back to replant the struggling church that led him to faith in the first place. You will hear what he found when he arrived, what it took to turn the culture around, and how his work with the Fresh Start Network is helping other churches walk the same road.

Shawn was told the church had three to six months left before it would close its doors. He found a congregation of about thirty five people who were discouraged but still open to what God might do. The building was aging, finances were tight, and the previous pastor's approach had left the church with a difficult reputation in the community.

"A sick church can't laugh, and a healthy church can't stop laughing."

Shawn points to a story about Howard Schultz returning to Starbucks and immediately sensing something was wrong the moment he walked into a store. For Shawn, the shift at Church at the Shores was similar. Around eight months in, he began to notice a change in the atmosphere, a sense that the joy of the Lord had returned to the room.

• The Starbucks parallel: Just as Schultz noticed a change in smell and feel before he could point to specific numbers, Shawn noticed a change in tone and laughter in the room before he could point to specific metrics.

• Joy as a marker of health: Shawn describes joy, not attendance, as one of the earliest and clearest signs that a church is coming back to life.

• Faces tell the story: Shawn now looks for people laughing and engaged as evidence that the culture has genuinely shifted.

Fresh Start Network was founded by Bill Malick, who helped see six thousand churches planted in the U.S. and abroad before turning his focus to churches that are struggling or dying. Shawn has served alongside Bill since the organization's early stages.

• The mission in one line: Fresh Start's team often says it this way, we're not saving churches, we're rescuing missions.

• The Fresh Start evaluation: A tool that helps church leaders understand where their congregation sits on the church life cycle, since every church moves through seasons.

• Coaching and resources: Once a church has clarity on where it stands, Fresh Start comes alongside with relationships and practical next steps.

• Partner churches: One of the most effective long term strategies Fresh Start has found is pairing healthy, life giving churches with struggling ones, either as a friendship partnersh...